Stencil work: scenes in a history with Eric Kindel

This talk took place on November 4, 2024 as part of Type@Cooper’s Herb Lubalin Lecture Series. The video archive of the event is made possible with the generous support of TypeCulture.

This talk will survey scenes of stencil work spanning six centuries, discussing and illustrating the stencil’s surprisingly varied use in the production of textual and graphic documents, marks, and messages. Drawing on many years of research, the talk will explore the aesthetic, technical, social, entrepreneurial, regulatory, and linguistic dimensions of stencil work. Among the scenes will be stencil incunabula, stencil work typical of France, Britain, and the USA, the complexities of stencil terminology, and the conundrum of stencil type and typefaces. On show will be early cut-work, magnificent books made in monastic and secular ateliers, stencils cut by known makers and anonymous ones, large scale stencilled advertisements, ingenious stencil devices, stencillers in action, and much more – together offering diverse perspectives on this attractive domain of letters, type, and graphic form.

Eric Kindel is Professor of Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. For twenty-five years he has been investigating the use of stencils for lettering, text composition, and other graphic mark-making. The research, some of it done with expert collaborators, has resulted in published studies, exhibitions, reconstructed stencilling equipment, and a working collection of historical artefacts and documents. His aim has been to establish a reliable account of stencil work across time, place, and context, bringing together individual episodes to eventually construct a synoptic history – or at least the framework of one.