Back to All Events

Offset Layout & Prepress: A Vanished Craft

  • The Post at 750 750 Hamilton Street Vancouver, BC, V6B 2R5 Canada (map)

An in-person event with Michael Kluckner
Introduction by Lynn Copeland

The event is free and open to public.


When talking recently with a 38-year-old friend who had done layout and production for the Ubyssey student newspaper 20 years ago, Michael Kluckner realized that he knew nothing about pre-digital print production – what Michael did in the 1970s and '80s to illustrate, typeset, layout and produce newspapers and books for offset printing.

Offset printing still exists, of course, but all the prepress techniques he used are a vanished craft, replaced by desktop publishing software. His talk will review those techniques of 50 years ago and show how the medium demanded certain skills and types of art for reproduction. The tail did indeed wag the dog.


Michael Kluckner is a writer and artist/book illustrator whose work includes farm memoirs, graphic novels and detailed works on the history and heritage of Canadian cities and the province of British Columbia. He is probably best known as a watercolour painter of landscapes and city scenes and has shown at the Petley-Jones Gallery in Vancouver for more than 20 years, but his work also includes experiments with chiaroscuro brush-ink painting, oils, and even occasional returns to his cartooning habits of the late 1970s when he drew for the Sun and Province newspapers. His books have won the Duthie Award, twice the Vancouver Book Prize, and twice the first prize for the Alcuin Book Awards for two works in the 1990s designed by the late Dean Allen. His latest book, Surviving Vancouver, has just been published by Midtown Press. Michael Kluckner lives in Vancouver, BC.

Next
Next
May 22

100 Years of BC Books