Art Metropole

#13364

The Amateur Printer

Artist

Alex Durlak

Price

$20.00

Date

2016

Publisher

Perish Publishing

Format

Artists' Books

Size

25.5 × 28 × 0.2 cm

Length

16 pp

Alex Durlak presents the latest version of The Amateur Printer, an on-going series of printed matter inspired by an essay of the same name from 1949 by Peter Beilenson, the printer, designer, and founder of Peter Pauper Press. The essay is a call to action for commercial book printers to take a break from the daily grind of running a business and to pick a text they love and print a book of it from scratch. The intent of such an act is to both rediscover the joy of printing in of itself and to have a playground for progressive experimentation over revisionism in design. This book is Durlak’s most recent answer to that challenge.

Alex Durlak is a Toronto based artist, musician and publisher best known for his contributions to the music community spanning close to two decades. His parallel artistic practice strongly focuses on the graphic arts, including typography, print-making and book design. An interest in text based works, the history of the arts in Canada, and institutional representation are prevalent in his practice. Durlak is also the proprietor of Standard Form, a print shop interested in working with and on behalf of the vanguard in Canada’s flourishing art scene; Perish Publishing, an independent press focused on artists’ books by practicing contemporary artists whose content is original to the publication; and Idée Fixe Records, a home for critical songwriters in the Canadian underground music scene.

Staple-bound, softcover, b/w and colour