by Ben Rejali

Aya Krisht at Mizna+RAWIFest in 2023 - Photo by Jordan Lee Thompson

“When you have to compose letter by letter, you start to realize and learn, you notice things about the nature of the type, the script, that you’ve never noticed before.” In a digital world where design feels dominated by “incessant output,” Lebanese designer and printmaker Aya Krisht has been on a journey of discovery, delving into the world of traditional printing and the history of Arabic type. Rather than prioritizing immediacy, the printmaker embraces methods which require her to slow down and sit with the complexities and nuances of the script. “As a designer, my professional degree was in graphic design,” Krisht explains, “but as a student, I got into printmaking and when I started working with letterpress the question became, well, what about Arabic letterpress?”

Originating in tenth century China with ceramic type, the later invention of the Gutenberg press in fifteenth century Germany revolutionized printing in the Western world and reigned supreme as the premier method of printing through the nineteenth century. Letterpress employs a relief printing technique where moveable metal type is laid out flat, “letter by letter,” before ink is applied and paper is pressed against the type to create copies via direct impression. The Arab world adopted this method much later than its Latinate neighbors and the interconnected Arabic script–where each letter has four distinct forms depending on where it falls within the word– posed difficult questions as to how the method could be properly adopted to match the highly cultivated calligraphic forms that Arabic is known for.

Growing up just outside Beirut, Lebanon, Aya Krisht migrated to the US after graduating from the American University of Beirut in 2015 and co-founded Maamoul Press, a small publisher and collective organized around the creation, curation and dissemination of comics, printmaking and book arts. Her introduction to letterpress came in Michigan where she “discovered this underground community” of letterpress printers. “For me, getting into letterpress was the revelation that there’s this entire network of people where one guy knows another guy and they’re all kind of connected.” Her exploration of traditional printing “just kind of snowballed” and, in the process, naturally connected the printing world of Lebanon with that of Michigan.

She found her first Arabic type an hour from where she lived in southeast Michigan, when she was connected with “someone who knows someone who collects non-Latin typefaces.” Krisht was amazed to find it there of all places, because “if there’s any left it’s buried in some Arab printshop in an Arab country and very little Arabic moveable type ever made it to the US.” More surprising to Krisht was that this collector’s type was purchased from Syracuse University’s print studio who had purchased it from a type foundry in Lebanon around 1970. “So it is a bit crazy that I’m in Michigan with this type that originated in Lebanon fifty years ago and now it’s with me.”

To the young designer, uncovering the history of the Arabic type, its introduction and development, is as crucial to her practice as working with letterpress itself. “The first Arabic type ever was made by Europeans under the auspices of the Catholic Church because they wanted to send missionaries to the Arab world, but they weren’t good at it because they didn’t really know the Arabic script.” Similar to the separate inventions of the letterpress in China and Germany, the creation of Arabic typefaces took place somewhat independently in both the Ottoman Empire and Iran during the nineteenth century.

Part of why she feels driven to pursue this research is because “for a long time this history wasn't really recorded, which recent research is now elucidating, and there are things that they were doing in metal type that we still don’t understand to this day.” Citing recent research on Persian Naskh type in nineteenth century Iran, Krisht gives the example of some extensions of the letters that stretch below the entire printed word. “How did they do that with metal?” she asks, still sounding astounded. “Much of the actual type itself didn’t survive; we only have printed specimens to go off of and we don’t fully understand how these people did these amazing things.”

By digging deep into these histories, Krisht has also found that printing is often intertwined with political matters. An article that recently caught her attention surrounded the editor-in-chief of the Lebanese newspaper al-Hayat. “What’s this guy’s name? Kamel Mrowa,” Krisht continued, “so this is the 1950s and they’re still printing with metal type using the Linotype system, a hot metal system where you can type words on a keyboard and it forms the lines as single pieces of metal and then you print with them, melt them back down and reuse them the next day.” In his search for a faster model, Mrowa went to the Linotype company and worked with them to develop a simplified version of the Arabic font which is then named after him “Mrowa Linotype Simplified Arabic,” but when he was assassinated in the years leading up to the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) they dropped his name from the typeface and eventually stopped mentioning his involvement at all.

What happened to Mrowa, Krisht believes, connects back to the present moment and the struggle for preservation. “One reason we don’t have so much documentation of the print history is because countries like Lebanon are constantly in a state of war and turmoil, destruction and destabilization.” In the socio-economic climate perpetuated by continuous wars, “you don’t have the conditions for letterpress as a practice to survive in Lebanon the way it did in the US where people have the time and space to care about it and preserve it versus just trying to survive.”

When asked about the role politics plays in her work, she answered: “in Gaza, every university has been demolished, every institutional archive has been demolished, history that is completely erased and with all of the people who get killed you’re also losing the knowledge they carried, indigenous knowledge about these traditions and aspects of our culture… So yes, the ongoing political situation is sort of inextricable from this work.” While the tools and materials Krisht uses encourage her to take her time to design more thoughtfully and intentionally, “the physical loss and destruction creates an urgency to want to record and preserve this knowledge.”

Letter by Letter: An Interview with Aya Krisht

Walls, Censorship and the Illusion of Control: An Interview with Khaled Jarrar

The Commander of Who?