Why Carleton’s Book Arts Lab wants you to steal its posters

To Kayleigh Lewis, Carleton University’s Book Arts Lab is one of life’s “greatest mysteries.” 

“I’ve always been intrigued by looking at it, just seeing the room, seeing what kind of things go on in there,” said Lewis, a first-year student in international affairs. 

Glass walls encase the Book Arts Lab on MacOdrum Library’s second floor. Some students carve designs into wood, while others cut large pieces of decorative paper for bookbinding. 

Four large printing presses sit in the back, one of which is similar to the press that Johannes Gutenberg — the inventor of the printing press — used himself. 

“In general it’s just a mystery,” Lewis said. “I know they do some form of creation there.” 

The Book Arts Lab is a space where students can learn how to book bind, letterpress print, wood cut and more.

But perhaps the biggest mystery is the lab’s brightly coloured posters that have appeared across campus this month.

They’re part of the lab’s many “Steal This Poster” campaigns run throughout the school year. The latest batch is for its Black History Month campaign.

The posters include the text “Black History Month is not just for Black people. Black history is Canadian history.” It’s a quote from Jean Augustine, the first Black Canadian woman elected to Parliament. The words “Steal this poster” are also printed on the design, next to a QR code, which leads to the Book Arts Lab website. 

Sarah Pelletier, a fifth-year PhD English student and senior Book Arts Lab assistant, said that while the campaign was initially a way to spread the word about the lab, its purpose has evolved. 

“It’s mostly just a lot of fun to engage students, to have students be excited about the lab and also the campus,” she said. “I just found that quote about Black History Month then thought it would be a nice thing to do.”

To Lewis, the Black History Month campaign has a special meaning.

On an early February night, she discovered one of the lab’s neon-green posters near the Dunton Tower elevator.

“As a Caribbean, it means a lot to me. It feels like I’m seeing that purpose appealing to my culture,” she said. “We’re sharing facts with each other by creating art [and] by putting up posters.

“It was a nice, meaningful moment.” 

Larry Thompson, the lab’s master printer, said the idea for the campaign came to him in the summer of 2023. He had read about students stealing posters at American universities because they “thought they looked cool” in For the Love of Letterpress, a textbook by letterpress professors Cathie Ruggie Saunders and Martha Chiplis. 

“It’s a way to promote the Book Arts Lab, as well as use the artistry, like the typeface,” Thompson said. “Something about the handset, old-school nature of [the poster] makes it attractive to people.” 

Thompson, who has been letterpress printing since the 1990s, said the posters’ old-fashioned design is important to preserve. 

“Our devices and everything that we use is vying for our attention. This offers something that’s more retro,” he said. “The medium is archaic. It’s antiquated, so it sticks out from the gloss that everything else is around it.” 

While it was Thompson’s idea to bring the “Steal This Poster” campaign to Carleton, the designing is mostly left up to the students. He said Pelletier has been the one to take the campaign “by the lapels and shake it.”

“It’s collaborative,” Pelletier said about the campaign. She added that she usually works on themes and designs – which normally revolve around holidays like Halloween or Valentine’s Day – with four other students in the lab.

Once a design is chosen, the printing process begins. 

“Everything on the poster is letterpress printed,” Pelletier said, adding that it can take “a couple of days” for illustrations to be carved into wood by hand for printing. 

For text, every letter has to be set line-by-line to print on paper that’s rolled through the press. To switch colours, the same paper has to be rolled through the press again with different ink. Between waiting for the ink to dry and printing multi-coloured projects, the process can take a couple of weeks to complete. 

Despite the time-intensive labour, Thompson said the practice of letterpress printing is all about appreciating the antiquated process. 

“We’re not trying to convince people to turn back the clock and use old ways instead of new ways of thinking,” he said. “These obsolete ways of doing things, if we just try them… It’s a walk in the shoes of people from another time who were just like us.”

Thompson said he hopes students can find a connection between letterpress printing and whatever it is they’re studying. He said a computer science student incorporated book arts into their assignment by creating a program to help people hand-set type correctly. 

“It’s trying to take humanistic behaviour from our past, and applying it to these new devices and machines,” he said. “I believe that book arts have an application in every subject.” 

Lewis said her studies never pushed her to get involved in the Book Arts Lab. But now that she has a poster — which she initially kept safe in the clear case that snaps onto her computer — she’s looking for a way to pay it forward. 

“I feel like this idea of stealing isn’t really stealing. We’re sharing knowledge with each other, and for me, I’m seeing a piece of history that resonates with me,” she said.

“The more we get to share those things and create those conversations, the more positive it is.”

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Featured image by Alexa MacKie/The Charlatan.