Nick Gill

Profile

Biography

Nick Gill runs Effra Press. He has been a typefounder for ten years and a printer for fifteen. Until February 2016, Nick worked at Hand & Eye Letterpress, one of the UK’s very few remaining jobbing printers. He also worked at The Type Archive (formerly The Type Museum) for many years, making matrices and cutting punches. Thanks to the tuition of Parminder Kumar Rajput, he’s one of three people in the world capable of making Monotype Composition matrices from Monotype punches.

In 2015, Nick was given a grant by the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust to study the cutting of typographic punches by hand, the casting of type in a hand mould, and the casting of type on pivotal casters. Nick studied with Stan Nelson, Emeritus Professor of Early Printing at the Smithsonian. He’s now one of the very few people in the world who have cut a punch by hand, and one of an even smaller number who continue to do so. In 2018, Nick took up a residency, helping to recondition casting machinery at Tipoteca Italiana Fondazione.

Nick is also a playwright, and his work has been performed in venues including The Royal Court Theatre, The Young Vic, and Núcleo Experimental, São Paolo.