
Upside Down, Left To Right: A Letterpress Film
Inside one of the last working movable-type print shops in the UK, at Plymouth University, printer Paul Collier sets type by hand, letter by letter, the way it was done for five centuries before computers. The film follows the physical work of letterpress: composing sticks, cases of lead type, the smell of ink, the mechanical thud of a press pulling an impression onto paper. Collier talks through the craft's near-disappearance as offset and digital printing took over commercial print runs, and why a handful of workshops like his have kept the equipment and the knowledge alive rather than letting it go to scrap. The camera lingers on the type cases and the presses themselves, treating them as the last working examples of a technology that shaped centuries of books, newspapers, and posters before anyone thought to preserve it as heritage. It is a small, focused portrait of a trade rather than a general history, built around one workshop and one practitioner who still does the work daily.