Henry Andersen & Lars Kwakkenbos
The Reading of Pleasure, Special Effects

In March 2024, together with students from graphic design and printmaking, we printed and bound a reader of texts and images under the title Special Effects. The reader gathered fragments of existing texts around medieval reading, the early printing press, and the plague. The book was printed using a mixture of lead type and photopolymer plates. The layout was made using a custom-designed software. Formally, the reader was designed to highlight the tactile effects of varying print techniques, paper stocks, and modular layout as a way to stage unexpected interuptions and elisions between a diverse set of sources. Each edition of the reader is marked with differences of print effects, paper and the sequence of pages decided on while binding.

For the organisation of the workshop itself, we drew on both the organisation of 16th century print shops and the production logics of punk zines of the 1980s and ‘90s. Printing was manual, collaborative, and editing was performed in-situ in reaction to the material being printed. We wagered that the sensory experience of early modern reading is contained as much in the motorics of print and the smell of ink as it is in the words on the page. A number of lectures (by Isabelle Sully, Simon Asencio and Brooke Palmieri) were organised in parallel to the printing.