Annie Bocel

Punchcutter and Printmaker

Conducted by Katy Nelson on April 6, 2022 at Brooklyn, New York, and Saint-Frégant, France via Zoom

Annie Bocel in her studio in Saint-Frégant, France. © Annie Bocel.

Based in Saint-Frégant France, Annie Bocel (b. 1988, Rennes, France) specializes in intaglio, embossing, and punchcutting. She studied engraving in Paris at the École Estienne and began her career apprenticing under the engraver Jean-Luc Seigneur. She was later selected to study under Nelly Gable and learn the 550-year old art of punchcutting, the first step in the traditional process of creating movable type for printing. Working by hand with gravers and files, punchcutters create steel “punches” carved in relief with the reverse image of each character. Finished punches are stamped into copper to produce hollow matrices that can in turn be used to cast lead type.

Punchcutting has become an exceptionally rare skill. Before training Bocel, Gable was the last active practitioner in France, carrying on a tradition established at the foundry Deberny & Peignot and continued at the Cabinet des Poinçons of the Imprimerie Nationale. To document their knowledge for future practitioners, Bocel and Gable have co-authored a book, Drawing the Movement: Cutting the Type Punch (Éditions des Cendres, 2019). Available in both English and French editions, Drawing the Movement features Bocel’s original drawings, illustrating each step of the punchcutting process in unprecedented detail.

In this interview, Bocel discusses her early studies, her introduction to punchcutting, her exposure to different creative approaches, her thoughts on the transmission of punchcutting knowledge, and her hopes for the future of the field.

Interview duration: 1 hour and 30 minutes.


[This interview took place in French and English via Zoom with Annie Bocel in Saint-Frégant, France, and Katy Nelson in Brooklyn, New York, with interpretation by Lucie Covington. Bocel’s French responses are reproduced here as translated into English.]

Katy Nelson (KN): To begin, I wanted to talk a little about your background and your early education.

Annie Bocel (AB): Okay, I come from an applied arts background. I did my baccalaureate in applied arts, where I discovered everything to do with the arts, architecture, visual communication. That’s what really set me off pretty naturally on my path towards an artistic trade.

KN: So was that when you were first exposed to printmaking, or was that later on?

AB: That was it. During the last year in applied arts, you prepare a diploma project entirely of drawings, which you develop over the course of the whole year based on your research and different case studies. So it’s something very personal. And at the end of that year, I actually discovered printmaking, and I said to myself, this is it, it’s obvious, because it just made sense, you see, at the level of the graphic work of black and white.

KN: And what attracted you to intaglio and embossing in particular?

AB: Today, one might look at intaglio and embossing—such specific techniques—and wonder how someone could get so invested in them. But it’s obvious when you’re actually in the moment, following your experience. Life presents you with things and you make certain choices. After a period dedicated to drawing, printmaking was the medium I was waiting for to approach the image in a new way through the lens of engraving. So essentially, the prints that I had seen during my bac at the end of the year, they were intaglio prints. Really, I just followed that interest. I applied to join the École Estienne, which is a school that lets you train in engraving, so the printed image.

KN: And what was your experience like there, at the École Estienne?

AB: Great! It was really a continuation of the applied arts training. It was a bit like a big playground, in the sense that you could really experiment with whatever you like. You have this graphic laboratory around you, you know. But it’s really short. In the end, if you look at the extent of the trades you learn in two years, that’s what? It’s really nothing. So it’s the beginning of something. It’s the promise of something to come. That’s how I see it.

KN: And I understand that after your graduation, you went on to study with the engraver Jean-Luc Seigneur. Can you tell me a little about that apprenticeship?

AB: It was a really nice match. Jean-Luc Seigneur was actually my professor at the École Estienne. He has a really generous spirit, and he has a wonderful outlook on today’s artistic trades and what you can do with them. He has a really interesting philosophy behind his work, and so this match felt really natural. So at the end of Éstienne, I could have opted to continue on with my studies in art school. But actually I made the choice at that moment to work in a professional studio and see what was going on in the professional world. What was the network like? Who were the craftspeople who made a living doing this today? So there, I made a choice. As it happens, I think it was actually really important for my development that I left art school. That said, both paths are good. But I’m quite happy to have been able to follow Jean-Luc from the start.

Printing an edition of La Grue from Bestiare d’amour, a 2014 series of intaglio prints by Annie Bocel. © Annie Bocel.

KN: What drew you ultimately to open your own printmaking studio then?

AB:
That came out of the spirit I shared with Jean-Luc Seigneur. It was really this idea of being independent, of continuing to create in the craft, so to do commissions, but also to be able to create independent projects. It was still within the framework of me trying to get my license. So there was some training that I still needed, but this was all within a year of alternating between my apprenticeship and being in the studio, and finally receiving my license for opening my own business. So really it was about this idea of earning freedom and autonomy, which was a big deal to me. I’m very happy that that happened early on. It let me experiment. Everything changed, really. My outlook became very different. So yes, it was a good thing to happen.

KN: How were you first introduced to the practice of punchcutting?

AB: Much later, actually. I first got a lot of experience in different studios. After working with Jean-Luc, I worked in a printshop, in an intaglio workshop where I gave courses. Then I wanted to return to the sea because I was born there, and so at the end of one year—it was 2013—Jean-Luc called me and told me about a woman, an engraver who was searching for a student. I hadn’t heard of Nelly Gable and I hadn’t heard of the trade Jean-Luc was telling me about. Nelly Gable had first approached the professors of the École Estienne to figure out which student profile best matched the skills the trade demanded. And so it happened a bit like that.

KN: What was your apprenticeship with Nelly Gable like? Can you tell me a little more about it?

AB: It was a good match. I mean, I called Nelly, and we spoke. We talked about meeting, we met, and I found it really wonderful, what she was telling me, what she was showing me. I like to say that she has a lucky star, because at first [pause] for me, it felt very different from my background. All of a sudden, with the typographic punch, I was in the world of the letter, whereas up until that point I had been practicing printmaking in the world of the image. On top of that, it wasn’t even the same engraving techniques, even if the final goal is still to print on paper, and so I wasn’t sure yet. It wasn’t until we met that I said, oh yes, it’s interesting, I want to learn more, I want to see this through.

KN: So this was your first experience working with type then?

AB: Yes, actually, it was. Punchcutting, it’s a whole world. It opens up other worlds. I mean, it takes you into the history of typography, so the whole world of typography. There’s the domain of writing, the different writing styles that exist, calligraphy. And then the technique in and of itself: it’s engraving in steel, so a metal that’s very resistant, with hand tools. It’s working in relief, so everything was new. And in terms of working with Nelly? I want to finally come back to the question about the nature of working as a pair. It was very interesting because Nelly also let me have a lot of autonomy, which I really needed to learn the new material and become comfortable with it. So that all worked well. She had a quite theoretical approach. She created a bubble, really, around the two of us, because she also had a lot of things to do around the Imprimerie Nationale. And so that allowed me to really begin to learn the trade in this bubble. And there was a bigger bubble—it was the Institut National des Métiers d’Art that supported this pairing, that supervised us, and that provided educational reports and followed up on us. So all of this, it was a super privileged setting, really. And it was invaluable. It was a huge opportunity to have this setting to be able to learn. Really just the guarantee to learn.

A completed R and an in-progress B. © Annie Bocel.


KN:
In your experience with Nelly, how was the knowledge of the craft transmitted? Was it through observation, oral instruction, textual study, or—?

AB:
Very interesting question. Really in several ways, but first in practice. For example, I spent a month learning to sharpen my first graver correctly. One graver, one month. So there you go. To communicate while practicing—because, you see, typographic punches are so small, a letter, it’s so small—so to know what we’re talking about, sometimes the easiest way was to draw. So Nelly made me sketches and I drew the positions of the hands to remember. But we’ll come back to that later because the book [Drawing the Movement: Cutting the Type Punch] goes along with this. And so there you have it, we made these sketches between ourselves in order to understand each other well, to be sure. But we were always working on this. I mean, we were always working on punchcutting, or how should I put it, on exercises for punchcutting, I should say. And what’s more, there was also a whole environment around us, the Cabinet des Poinçons at the Imprimerie Nationale. And since I was working on the inventory, I had access to the collection of punches which covers more than 500 years of history. So that was incredibly valuable to my learning.

KN: What exactly did you do in that month? What was it you were practicing?

AB: It was sharpening, sharpening gravers. There are actually three angles for sharpening, and then polishing. And that takes time. The sharpening of gravers is really a particularity of this discipline.

KN: Could you briefly walk me through the process of producing a single punch?

Gravers and files. © Annie Bocel.

AB: So the goal, effectively, is to engrave a letter on a steel bar. This letter, you really have to keep in mind that it’ll strike copper, so it’ll undergo a shock, a pressure on the level of the metal. And then the ultimate goal is to print, so to print with the help of lead type. The whole engraving is really guided by this objective. So it’s really an object that’s engraved in order to ultimately be printed. We’re engraving a steel bar. It’s the eye of the punch that we engrave—what we call the eye, it’s the elevated surface. The bottom of the punch, we’ll round it off because it’ll be struck. We work with files. In fact, all the exterior surfaces are going to be trimmed with a file, so we’re going to file the steel. And the interiors, what we call the counterforms, we carve them gradually with the help of different gravers. So we get into the letter like that. I don’t know if that helps you without seeing. We’re not completely blind in the process. We can actually make smoke proofs as we go along. It’s what we call a carbon black print. So we put a layer of smoke on the punch and we print it on paper.

Punches are engraved in relief from steel bars. At left are two large punches turned bottom side up. In preparation for striking, the bottom of each punch has been rounded with a file. At right are two smaller punches turned “eye” side up: the left punch is still in progress, while the right punch is complete. © Annie Bocel.

KN: I understand that in addition to your studies with Nelly Gable, you’ve also observed the techniques of Stanley Nelson in the US and Richard Årlin in Sweden. What did you learn from their practices?

AB: Meeting them was really important. And it was good that it happened at the end of the transmission with Nelly. So what you have to know is that with Nelly, we’re on a level of technical heritage. It’s a whole chain of engravers that goes back to the foundry Deberny & Peignot. So it’s really a French tradition. I really want to stress how it’s typically French, very demanding, where certain engravers had really put the time into developing their techniques. And that’s what made meeting Stan and Richard interesting, especially Richard. With Stan, we laughed about it—it was really, like they say, “the dark side of punchcutting.” He showed me how to strike the counterform with punches, where we [with Nelly] engrave with a graver. But we laughed because Stan had already come to see Nelly in France for training, and so it was really uninhibited. And so instead of spending three weeks on a punch, we spent one week on a punch but we also made the matrix and cast the lead type and printed. So the notion of time was different. Even so, Stan had a very historical approach. We spent a huge amount of time in his library, as much time as at the workbench, and that was really important for my development. And then with Richard, that was also a very, very wonderful meeting. Richard is self-taught; he had no training in punchcutting. He really learned from books, actually. And Richard, he’s actually also an artist. The characters he chose and engraved, seeing them did me a lot of good because there was so much poetry. So you can be poetic without necessarily making the letter perfect—we didn’t have to make this perfect polished jewel. In fact, we accepted mistakes and the beauty that came with them. And with Richard, I was really touched and realized that it was actually possible to engrave typefaces. We just had to change the demands we put on ourselves and follow an approach based on art or a theme linked to creation. So that was a promising realization with Richard.

KN: So that was quite different, I imagine, than the approach of the Imprimerie Nationale, with its more technical tradition focused on perfection.

AB: Yes, that’s right. It’s not so much the Imprimerie Nationale as it is their engravers. What I mean is, it’s really the way that knowledge was passed on to or transmitted among the engravers at the Cabinet des Poinçons. And so that’s the foundry Deberny & Peignot, which, as it happens, gave their last engravers when closing their doors in the seventies, I believe. And so it’s this contrast between the two that’s really, really stark, in fact, because for my part, okay, I can learn the craft, but if it’s complicated to pass on, it’s too demanding if we don’t accept making little mistakes. So how do we do it so there’s more of a future? So the idea really was to make it easier to pass on, a sort of popularization. But the word popularization isn’t good because there’s something [pause] it’s the material really—what are we going to draw out of this material? And what you can play out can really be very beautiful.

KN: You mentioned that there are multiple approaches to cutting counterforms, either employing a counterpunch or “digging” the counterforms with a graver. I’m curious what guides the decision to use counterpunches or to work manually.

The negative spaces within a character are known as counterforms. Following the techniques passed on to her, Bocel engraves counterforms by hand with a graver. © Annie Bocel.

AB: Right, the counterpunch, that’s the “dark side of punchcutting.” So I remain loyal to the technique Nelly taught me, which is very demanding but which also really keeps you from wasting time engraving and lets you focus on what’s essential. That’s to say that otherwise, okay, this will get a bit technical, otherwise, you stamp the punch to make the counterform. The problem is that you’re creating a relief in the material. The steel will be damaged by that. We lose our marks and the drawing of the letter. So that means that you have to repolish it, get the letter drawing back in its place, which means redoing the transfer and then fixing this design with drypoint. This is inaccurate because the outer parts of the letter at this step have already been trimmed with a file. You’re too close to the outer slopes, and there’s little support and too few landmarks to make a correct letter transfer. So for us—when I say us, I’m thinking about what Nelly passed on to me—stamping is really too imprecise as a technique. So essentially, it’s in tradition—how was it done before? I don’t know. I think that in terms of her engraving technique, she has proven herself and for us, she’s the most serious. Certainly, there have been different techniques in different studios, but in France, I think that we trust what Nelly was able to learn from her master Jacques Camus. Really working the punch with a graver and file. That’s a safer method of engraving for us.

KN: Up until the nineteenth century, punchcutting was really the only means to produce matrices. But today, of course, machine production of matrices is possible. So at the risk of oversimplifying, I’m curious why it’s important to preserve the skill of hand punchcutting.

AB: Excellent question. It’s this question that I’ve been asking myself since the start, actually, when I set myself up at the workbench, because I don’t have a calling as a conservator. I didn’t have that approach at the beginning, and I don’t think that Nelly was looking for a conservator either, someone who was going to be satisfied just preserving the handwork, the craft itself. The idea actually today—and it’s this that I’m reflecting on—was initially the work that we were doing together on transmission, but maybe we’ll talk about that in a bit. This first step was really like a message in a bottle in the sea, where we put out a little of our know-how. We explain how to make punches in the book. So it’s an act of transmission. And once that was realized, the second big question became, how can I justify practicing this technique today? How do I give it a form of legitimacy? Conserving things isn’t enough. That’s why I started talking about the book. I mean, it was first done with Nelly on the transmission of know-how, and in a second step, in thinking about a project that’d bring a certain legitimacy to this know-how. The goal of this project is basically going to be to draw a typeface from the point of view of a contemporary punchcutter. So rethink the way we engrave—really play because it’s meant to be totally fun. I think that through art or an artistic approach, this know-how still has a lot to contribute. In the same way that intaglio has offered a lot of possibilities in the realm of the image, with typography you can also do really interesting things. So the idea is to allow more flexibility today. A project that just opens the possibilities and shows us that we can have fun with this know-how too.

KN: That brings me to another question. In the book you co-wrote with Nelly Gable [Drawing the Movement: Cutting the Type Punch], you address punchcutting as this embodied skill, where your stance, your posture, your movements all play important roles. Can you tell me more about that?

AB: That’s what was really lacking, actually. If we go back in history and look at the existing manuals, there are very few of them, because, in fact, there were very few engravers and the knowledge was transmitted orally. But the little that exists doesn’t show the gestures. Hence the name: Dessins de geste in French or Drawing the Movement in English. The idea was to show precisely what we don’t usually see, namely in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert. We have the tools, but we don’t have the hands, and in fact, it’s all crucial. So it’s an attempt to get closer to a master who shows us the technique in real life, really to show a bit of a master or a person who passes the knowledge on to us. It’s meant to show how the hands are positioned, what angle you need for sharpening. Because all of that, it’s crucial. It’s super in depth for gravers. The way you see how you use these tools, all that was to really give a living, physical trace. And actually, what happened is I started from the drawings that I made for myself at the start. I mean, at the start, the transmission itself was short compared to [pause] well, it takes ten years to train a punchcutter. We had three years ahead of us. We managed to work five years together in the end, but the fact remains that we had three years of transmission. And so I actually drew all the time to be able to remember later and come back to it. It was a lot of information. So it was my hands that I represented, and so the second time round, when we wanted to do this work of transmission, then I redrew composed plates to be able to speak to others so that it’s actually readable.

A plate illustrating the punchcutting process from a 1763 volume of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Image: University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project.

Instead of merely illustrating the punchcutter’s tools, Annie Bocel’s drawings in Drawing the Movement: Cutting the Type Punch (Éditions des Cendres, 2019) demonstrate how to hold and manipulate materials at each step of the process. © Annie Bocel.

KN: I imagine that there are also certain characters or styles of type that pose particular challenges. Can you tell me what qualities are the hardest for a punchcutter to convey?

AB: Well anything at a right angle, off the bat, it’s complicated. Especially in counterforms, so everything in the vein of Didot, Bodoni. Before launching into that kind of engraving, I think it’s important to be comfortable at the workbench, and especially with the graver. Apart from that, it really varies character to character. Going down into body type is also an exercise in style. That is, going down in the sizes of the punches you’re engraving. When you’re learning, it’s still 36-point or bigger. And that already seems very tiny to you. You should know, for example, that at the Cabinet des Poinçons of the Imprimerie Nationale, we have a typeface, the Grandjean, which goes from 4-point punches to 120-point. We’re not able to engrave 4-point punches today, that’s really [pause] I think you’d have to be able to practice every day from the age of fourteen, and that’s what these punchcutters did. So there’s a difference, but at the level of the characters, I think that if you asked me tomorrow to engrave a Didot, I’d say, calm down [laughs], give me a little time to practice first.

Giambattista Bodoni’s 1788 Manuale Tipografico displays sample settings of Bodoni’s typeface designs, ranging from remarkably tiny body faces to large display cuts. With their razor-thin hairlines and crisp, angular serifs, Bodoni’s designs present a particular challenge to the punchcutter. Image: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

KN: Punchcutting also demands thinking across media and formats. I’m curious how you approach translating a two-dimensional drawing into a three-dimensional metal punch.

AB: I think that the method of working is really a very, very closed framework. Once you’ve learned the method, you can relax into it. So there’s a way of going about things. There are steps to engraving, and little by little, you can work your way into the steel. So at first, essentially, you have this drawing that you have to transfer. It’s all very methodical. That’s what we show in the book, and that’s Nelly’s particular expertise. You observe the letter—there’s almost a full page on observing the letter. You take the dimensions with the calipers, and there, to make it easier, I try to envision multiple punches at once instead of a single one at a time. Really, it’ll work itself out. You just have to follow the process and the method of getting into the steel. You always start by removing the outside surfaces on a punch, so you file the whole outside. I actually have a pretty natural ease with the file—I really love it, I love filing. And you never start cold; it’s all about warming up. It’s the method that makes it possible, really, and that lets you reach the end.

A spread from Drawing the Movement demonstrates techniques for observing the letter. © Annie Bocel.


KN: You also, I assume, have to be constantly considering how the resulting type will print. I’m curious how, if at all, ink spread or other aspects of the printing process affect your decisions.

AB: When you learn a skill that’s 550 years old, the advantage is that there have been many people to test things out, make mistakes, and do it all over again, so you can put some trust in tradition. There were moments with Nelly where I wondered, wow, is it all just superstition? Can I just twist things around because I like to test the limits, see if we can’t do things differently? But really at some point, you also have to say to yourself, okay, the knowledge that’s been passed on to me, it’s been proven. So everything is already thought about in advance. That’s what I was trying to get at. I mean, that’s what I’ve been saying. We engrave a shape that’s intended to be printed. The engraved object isn’t enough on its own. So it’s already defined by the fact that it’ll be used to strike copper and then the resulting matrix will be used for melting lead. From the start, the surface of the punch is a polished mirror. There are no catches. The surface has to be really smooth. Then, there are actually bevels around it, which you make with a file that really allows you to clear, to strip. But that’ll actually affect the striking and casting. So historically, it’s a job between the punchcutter and the type founder. Not right away because I have to focus on engraving, but I’m thinking about acquiring a mold to found type by hand. It’s Gutenberg’s technique, really, the craft of typefounding in its essence. To be able to found type myself and see what I get, really go all the way, and see if I can play with it. How can I experiment with the technique?

KN: Is that unusual for a punchcutter to also found type themselves?

AB: No, not really. In the sense that in the first century that Gutenberg introduced his process, so around 1450, there was a century of experimentation where the trades actually weren’t so compartmentalized. So sometimes the punchcutter might have also been the type founder and the printer. And so there was a whole century of experimentation, which, in my opinion, was a period of real freedom. I think a lot about the birth of printing because the very reality of approaching extinction—that a craft like this can be an endangered species—that also makes us think more about why it was created, how it was created. And so today I think about what happened between the fifteenth century and now, what we really think of as the prototype punches, made by people who might have at once been punchcutters, typefounders, and printers—they generally did everything manually. So I see an interesting bridge between that period and today. So, yeah, I’m not sure if I’m being clear enough.

KN: No, it’s clear! I just want to know, when you say “an interesting bridge,” what is it that’s an interesting bridge between the fifteenth century and today?

AB: What I find interesting, it’s the ability to go fully to the end of the process, to be able to punchcut, found the characters, and ask yourself what you want to print. And between the two periods? If I think about what’s happened since then, everything’s been compartmentalized. It would have been a little [pause] it would have been out of the ordinary to practice it, you see. But today, I think that it makes sense to go back to the whole process to really learn how to master it. That was really brought to life with Stan Nelson and Richard Årlin—with them, I was able to experiment with this. I mean, punchcut the letter and within the same week, cast the type. And that, that’s great. Really, it’s wonderful.  

A punch, a matrix, and a piece of lead type for a letter R. © Annie Bocell.

KN: In thinking about all of these distinct roles of type production, I’m curious about the role of the punchcutter in relation specifically to the type designer.

AB: So it really depends if you’re taking a historical point of view. It sometimes happened that the type designer was also the punchcutter. So the question no longer applies—it’s a duel between oneself and oneself. Later, in terms of the relationship to the type designer: me personally, I haven’t yet experienced working with a type designer. But we actually offered trainings to people who wanted to discover punchcutting, and as it happens, it was an audience of type designers, and that was really interesting. I’m a little off topic from the question, but they really bring this whole universe around typography to the practice. And so it really feels like two worlds coming together. Because it was actually born from that—punchcutting was born from that, in my opinion. I actually tried to develop a project at the National Printing Office, but it didn’t work out. Essentially, the idea was to work on a typeface that had been drawn recently and to engrave it. So I hope in the future to be able to experiment with that.

KN: So that project at the Imprimerie Nationale won’t be made public?

AB: No, the project that I was talking about just now won’t be published. But the project that I’m working on myself, I like to say that I’m designing a typeface from the perspective of a punchcutter. So there, I’m playing with this ambiguity. There are some type designers who have been punchcutters. I particularly appreciate the work of Rudolf Koch. Rudolf Koch was a German calligrapher and punchcutter, and he really played with the technique. He designed a typeface where you actually feel the work of the punchcutter in the way that it’s drawn. So it’s this point of connection that interests me moving forward, how to reveal and play with these two worlds at once.

KN: Can you tell me more about your interest in designing an original typeface?

AB: I approached it like a research exercise around engraving, so there’s a lot to explore. It’s really rich. I have to figure out how to summarize it because I’m in the midst of working on it. It might be easier to just talk about it. So the project I’m working on, I’m not going to engrave a complete letter. In fact, the initial idea was to engrave as little as possible. When you start out on an alphabet, in general, it’s between 150 and 300 punches on average. My challenge was to engrave as little as possible, and so I came up with a solution: instead of engraving a complete letter, I’d engrave a part of the letter, so separate the parts one from another. So the idea was really to engrave elements like modules. They’d be separate modules of the same letter. So, once I got to this point, I made the connection with calligraphy. I practice calligraphy on the side. And so, when you make a letter in calligraphy, it’s really a dance. An A can be done in three moves—one, two, three. It’s what’s called the ductus. And so I came to the idea because I didn’t want to engrave a character in a cold, mechanical way. Because ultimately, this principle of isolating the elements from each other is cold and mechanical. But I wanted something that felt alive, that was all about the sense of life, the stroke, the gesture. And in particular, I said to myself here, okay, why not engrave the ductus, that is, the elements separated from each other. And so for that, I needed a cursive. So I started looking for a cursive to use as a model. Of course, it doesn’t fall from the sky like that. And so for the moment, everything is based on a Gothic cursive that I’m working on. Because it’s all about reducing, one part is going to be used for other parts, so a straight line can be used again in another letter. So there are actually fewer forms, less complicated work with the graver. And since I like the file, that works out well. And so in a certain way, as I reduced things, I told myself I’d allow more diversity, so new forms, new ligatures. So maybe I’m going to let myself engrave a different E, so I’d no longer have just one E, but different Es because this would give the feeling of the hand that you get in a cursive. It’s all about a balance between typography and calligraphy, how you draw a character. So that’s what I’m working on at the moment.

KN: I would love to see photos of this project. I don’t know if it exists yet but—

Printed by Robert Granjon in 1557, Dialogue de la vie et de la mort showcased Granjon’s new typeface, whose organic forms were informed by contemporaneous French handwriting styles. The design later came to be known as Civilité. Image: Bibliothèque nationale de France. © Annie Bocel.

AB: I haven’t sent you photos yet because it’s in the research stage and I really want to give myself that space to think through it. In fact, the Gothic cursive that I chose as a model wound up giving me another model, which is the Civilité type. It was cut by Robert Granjon in the sixteenth century, and Granjon wanted it to be a so-called “French” type. It’s a typeface that I saw at Stan’s, actually, re-engraved later because everything gets revisited all the time. And I found it very beautiful because it has a real power, a graphic presence, which we also find in the original Gothic cursive. It really relies on a graphic power, closer to an image. So there I’m actually coming full circle back to the image. It’s going to be a journey of ups and downs and we’ll see how it plays out. But that’s in progress. 

KN: I’m excited to see eventually! In terms of credit for punchcutting work, I’ve heard that punchcutters often work for many years before they’re permitted to sign their punches. I’m curious what the customs are today compared to what they have been historically.

AB: I think that impression must come from the Cabinet des Poinçons. It’s not exactly a tradition. That is to say that today, we can sign our punches. That actually makes it easier to keep track of them over time. I think that notion must come from Louis Gauthier, an engraver who created the Cabinet des Poinçons in 1948 and who never had more than three engravers in the Cabinet. Louis Gauthier was the head of the workshop, and he didn’t allow the other two engravers who worked with him to sign their punches until they had been there a certain amount of time. I don’t think it holds true anymore. I don’t know everything either. It probably had to do more with his personality, someone who worked divinely well and also worked in a studio with two other engravers. And those two other engravers didn’t really get their due. One of them was Jean-Pierre Réthoré, who actually gave me some of his materials. A wonderful person who’s no longer with us.

KN: I’m also wondering, working so closely with Nelly but also interacting with the longer history of punchcutting, if the gendered nature of the profession has impacted your experience entering the field. By my understanding, Nelly is actually the first documented woman punchcutter. So I’m curious to hear about your experience.

AB: Well for me, not really. Because I come a little after the “battle”—in quotes, there wasn’t really a battle. But in this case, for me, I haven’t experienced any injustice directly. But I know that for Nelly, being a woman made it more complicated to break into the Cabinet des Poinçons. That was complicated from the start. History is history. Today, it turns out that I’m a woman and I’m a punchcutter. I could’ve been a man. But no, for me personally, there wasn’t any of that—it hasn’t had an impact. I am really curious to see how history has evolved, and so the opposite would have surprised me, but I think that Nelly was affected more and that was normal given her generation. So in that era, it was new. And I’ll just add that I think for me, it’s linked to my upbringing, because I had a mother who was really independent, very free, and who made sure that her children were too. And so for me, a woman punchcutter, it’s normal. I grew up like that and I didn’t see the point in putting up barriers where there’s no need.

KN: I’m curious, you’ve also talked about these trainings with Nelly—did you see more of an equal gender balance in them or no?

AB: No, in fact, there really wasn’t. I hadn’t ever thought about it, but actually, there was only one woman and she was the wife of one of the type designers, but she wanted to do the training also. It’s an interesting question. But I think that it could evolve because in the world of type design, I don’t know a number, but there are many women. So I’m telling myself that in time, things will even out. Without a doubt. They have to.

KN: I’m even curious just how many punchcutters you’re aware of that are currently practicing today. Outside of yourself, Nelly Gable, Stanley Nelson, and Richard Årlin, are there other trained punchcutters practicing around the world?

AB: Well, so, there’s Christian Paput, but he’s retired. He was a former colleague of Nelly’s. Other than that, currently active, no, not to my knowledge. So that brings us back to the urgency with Nelly of making this transmission of knowledge happen, of making sure it was correct. And doing that work gave us a second chance to go over what I had learned, because in drawing, you uncover lots of things, and there’d be certain plates where Nelly would say, oh, that’s not exactly it. So we’d revisit it, and that’s the important part for us really, because, okay, things evolve and eventually the know-how disappears, but maybe not so fast. And so we talk about it, we linger on it. Maybe there are things we can still do with it today. So not so fast. We have to hold on a little longer. But just to allow me to add: on the other hand, we have more and more training requests from people who want to be type designers. They’re really the people who are the most interested. It makes sense because of the relationship to designing letters. And so that’s something that I’m going to develop in my workshop. There’s a training already scheduled for this summer, so I tell myself that maybe things [pause] there’s an interest today that wasn’t there ten years ago. That’s what I talk about with Nelly. Times are changing, so maybe there could be future punchcutters. That would be great.

KN: Why do you think there’s this new interest in the craft?

AB: I think we’re dealing with a much more global situation in terms of the scale of our societies. There’s a return to craft trades. There’s a demand for them. The more we go into a certain system, the more we realize that we’re losing how to do things manually. So those who are interested are people who are used to drawing characters and they want to explore this “dinosaur” craft a bit to see how it’s done. I think it’s really the moment. So let’s get going.

KN: And is it mainly French people or—?

AB: It doesn’t really have borders. It’s very diverse. No, no, it’s not—it’s very few French people, not many at all. The majority of people who come here to train are actually from abroad. But it’s still a very small community.

KN: So for these new pupils who will be training with you, what are the work prospects afterwards? What types of clients continue to support punchcutting work?


Bocel’s 2019 reproduction of a typographic ornament by Robert Granjon. © Annie Bocel.

AB: So, mainly collectors. In particular, I had a project to reproduce a punch from the sixteenth century by Robert Granjon. And so that was the idea. In fact, it was Patrick Goossens who commissioned this, and he actually wanted to use two techniques in tandem—the old technique where you engrave the punch and strike the matrix, and a machine, the Benton, I believe. It’s a pantograph machine he has in his workshop. Right now, of course, it’s hard to find a way to make a living with punchcutting. Actually, the idea is to open up different possibilities that come from this craft. The process also makes it possible to make marks when a craftsman needs to strike metal, so it’s flexible, it’s okay, it’s workable. But if we’re really talking about engraving a typeface, for the moment, I haven’t met the right client. But the fact remains that I still go about my work. If I think it holds up and it’s interesting, I’ll submit it to competitions. So that’s the most interesting way to highlight the practice, in the immediate future at least. But it’s the beginning, so we’ll see what happens over time.

KN: Are there a lot of competitions?

AB: Well, there aren’t any specifically in punchcutting. That’s very [laughs] but I think of organizations that want to promote artistic disciplines so feel aligned with the goal of the project. It’s research around typography, but it’s an artistic approach. There are many places where it can be presented, I think.

KN: Do you think that there will be more of a place for original, contemporary punchcutting work, the translation of new type designs into metal punches? Or is the trajectory more focused on the rehabilitation of historic type?

AB: For me personally, preserving the know-how just to preserve—this approach of conservation—I find that really makes things inert, in fact. The idea is really to make it about creation. But to do that, you first have to be able to transmit it. Also, you have to be able to transmit it in a way that actually feels doable, so that the know-how is accessible to everyone. It has to be fluid. But if I go that direction, it’s certainly to try something new, because otherwise, to just conserve—that would create dead letters. That would be a shame.

KN: This brings me to a closing question: what are your hopes for the future of the field and for your own career?

AB: Okay, how to wrap things up? Well, here goes. My first hope is that I can bring the project I’m thinking about at the moment to fruition. And that it does its job—that it proves you can have fun making typographic punches. And so it could be an example in the sense that you could say to yourself, I’d like to engrave my typeface, and okay, well, I take the time to do it and maybe there are even shorter ways to do it. Me, I do it with the technique that was passed on to me, but actually, there may be other ways of engraving, too. So the idea is to open up a dialogue around that. So it merges with the transmission—it’s the idea that it has to be in the service of new projects because otherwise we’ll just get bored, really. The goal is to have fun and see the potential of this method, see what it can do, because at the end of the day we’re still working in the service of writing. And what’s behind it? What do we actually print? What type of texts are we printing, what works? What do we want to support? So we find ourselves facing these questions that are the same questions we asked ourselves during the Renaissance, around the inception of this method. It’s beautiful—we have to be able to share it all. I really hope that something will come of it.

[End of interview]

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