Aya Krisht Letterpress is the origin of typography. The digital type we use today developed from movable type; letterpress history and practice help us understand how type works and where it began. In the Western world, letterpress has endured as both a craft and educational tool, deepening and facilitating Latin typographic understanding. In the Arab world however, letterpress printing has seen a severe decline since its commercial obsolescence, with both material and intangible aspects of the practice becoming lost.
As a connected script with a dynamic morphological structure, Arabic has a complex history of adaptation to typographic technologies, which have generally been conceived around the much more straightforward Latin script. This history is crucial to understanding Arabic typography, yet has become obfuscated in the transition to digital practice, which often lacks clarity and understanding of its letterpress origins.
This presentation looks at how the decline and disappearance of Arabic letterpress created large gaps in Arabic typographic knowledge and education, and the utility of letterpress as an educational tool for understanding both Arabic typographic development, and intricacies of Arabic script and typographic conventions. It also examines the current landscape of Arabic letterpress, which is caught between erasure and scattered revival efforts. Renewed and growing interest in this practice, along with the knowledge gaps left by its decline, and its importance as a crucial yet overlooked aspect of Arabic typographic history, demand greater attention to its revival.