Global Perspectives on Lithographic Printing

For nearly 60 years, Michael Twyman, Emeritus Professor and Founder of the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, has transformed the study of lithographic printing. His scholarship on the advent, aesthetics, and artistry of nineteenth-century lithography established its historical value across a remarkable range of media, from children’s books and ephemera to maps and music.

Building on this legacy, the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication and the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing (CBCP), in collaboration with the Kunsthistorisches Institut (KHI) in Florenz, will host a two-day workshop exploring lithography as a truly global medium. The programme will investigate how this versatile technology has travelled across borders and oceans, been adapted to diverse linguistic, artistic, and commercial needs, and become woven into varied cultural and political contexts. By foregrounding lithography’s role in circulating texts and images worldwide, the event will illuminate its influence on visual and material cultures from the nineteenth century onward.

Drawing on CBCP’s tradition of fostering global and material histories of print, the workshop will extend Twyman’s pioneering work by tracing the circulation, adaptation, and integration of lithography in different parts of the world, opening fresh perspectives for researchers and enriching the study of print culture today.

In addition to the invited speakers, the workshop will feature live printing demonstrations of the Department’s Senefelder Pole Press (reconstruction by Alan May with direction by Michael Twyman) by Geoff Wyeth and object sessions featuring the collections of Michael Twyman and Borna Izadpanah. 

Online attendees please note: The symposium will run over two days, with separate MS Teams links for each day. To attend both days, please make sure you register using both of the links below.

• To join us via MS Teams on 5 March 2026, please register here
• To join us via MS Teams on 6 March 2026, please register here

Programme:

(Please note: All times shown in GMT)

Thursday, 5 March 2026

 9.30 Coffee and registration

10.00–10.15 Opening Remarks

Session 1: Early Lithography in Islamic & Scribal Cultures
10.15–11.30 (Chair: Fiona Ross)
Borna Izadpanah Script, stone, and type: visual continuities in Iran’s earliest printed Qurʼans
Wei Jin Darryl Lim Lithography at Riau’s “Gateway to Mecca”

11.30–12.00 Coffee

12.00-1.00 (parallel session repeated on Friday; 10 in each group)
Pole Press Demonstration (Geoff Wyeth)
Michael Twyman’s Lithographic Collection (Emma Minns)

1.00–2.15 Lunch

Session 2: Transregional Encounters with the Lithographic Press
2.15–3.30 (Chair: Sophie Heywood)
Erin Piñon Ottoman-Armenian encounters with the lithographic press
Mimi Cheng  Medium and message in nineteenth-century maps of East Asia

3.30–4.00  Tea and welcome to Book Launch visitors

4.00 Book Launch
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Typography
Editors in conversation, followed by discussion

Curators’ tour of exhibition in Department of Typography & Graphic Communication Display Area: Books and the People. Opening up access to books and reading #Go All In

Friday, 6 March 2026

9.30 Coffee

Session 3: Modernity and Visual Experimentation
10.15–12.30 (Chair: Gerhard Wolf)
Hannah Rose Blakeley Belgian lithography and book illustration ca. 1900
Helena de Barros Material logics of printed colour in European and Brazilian chromolithography
Asiel Sepúlveda Lithography and the spectacle of sugar manufacturing in
nineteenth-century Cuba

12.30–1.30 Lunch 

1.30–2.30 
Pole Press Demonstration  (Geoff Wyeth)
Michael Twyman’s Lithographic Collection (Emma Minns)

2.30–3.30 
Collection Session: Iranian Lithography (Borna Izadpanah)

 3.30–3.45
Closing Remarks

Tea in commemoration of Professor Michael Twyman

7:15  Conference Dinner (participants & invited guests)