Brian Allen knows his letters. His favorite one is A. He can tell you that the Phoenicians wrote it upside-down to resemble a horned ox head, and the Greeks began to turn
it around sideways. The Romans set it on its feet — as it stands today.
“The history of the alphabet is very interesting,” Allen says, looking around his studio in North Raleigh at the various forms of A he has displayed, cast into glass and pressed into paper. Beautiful hand-printed papers are framed on the walls: poems, quotations, invitations and announcements he has created over the years as a letterpress printer in Colorado and California. Now he has brought his craft to Raleigh.
Officina Briani — Latin for “Workshop of Brian” — occupies an unprepossessing space in a small one-story office park off Millbrook Road. Inside, Allen’s workshop is a world of its own, thrumming with classical music and artwork — and everywhere paeans to the beauty of the printed word, and the printed word itself.
Tactile Quality
Laid out on a worktable beside his 158-year-old, cast iron English hand press are the various pieces of a wedding invitation. It is his latest project, a beauty of intricate, deeply grooved detail, soft brown ink and thick paper. “It’s difficult to understand what letterpress is without touching it,” he says. “I have to show people a piece and have them run their hand over it. I can use beautiful handmade paper, and the printing creates a wonderful tactile quality.”
Allen has been working with letters and their forms for over 30 years, as a typesetter, calligrapher and letterpress printer. He also for many years designed fonts for IBM, specializing in turning analog typefaces into digital letters and creating missing characters: a euro sign, for instance, or one for percent; also unusual pieces of punctuation. But he soon realized that his passion was in the physical act and craft of printing. “I am happiest when I use my hands,” he says.
Handwriting as Inspiration
Letters, indeed, seem to be in Allen’s blood. His admirably tidy and interesting handwriting itself was turned into the font Segoe Script. As a result, Allen can pull off the uncanny trick of writing a sentence out longhand on a piece of paper with a pen and turning to his computer, typing in the same sentence and printing out its nearly identical twin.
“I’ve had an interest in letterforms since the end of college,” Allen says. His first job was with a Boston mapmaker, where he typeset street names and indexes and began to learn calligraphy on the side. By the time he was creating fonts for IBM, he’d bought his first printing press, a 1000-pound behemoth he put in his living room and used to moonlight as a letterpress printer on the weekends. “I was not married, and so it was OK,” he jokes today. “I realized that this was what I was meant to do. I became very attracted to the idea of craft and wanting to do something well.”
Now Allen’s sideline has become his life. His clients are both corporate and individual, and his products range from business cards and product announcements to invitations and personal stationery. Also, Allen has begun to teach his craft. “People have been bugging me for 20 years, saying I should teach,” he says. “I love showing people. It’s tremendously gratifying.”
Information about Officina Briani’s products and Allen’s classes can be found at www.officinabriani.com.”