Greyt Big Talk w/ Joseph Makkos
Pioneering Print Conservation in New Orleans
For years, Joseph Makkos salvaged letterpresses and boxes of rare type from local print shops.
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Joseph Makkos
Print historian and founder, NOLA DNA
Joseph S. Makkos is a print historian and the founder and CEO of NOLA DNA, a business dedicated to the digital archiving and preservation of historic printed material. Through it he manages and curates a collection of some 30,000 historic New Orleans newspapers, a project covered by The Atlantic, the Columbia Journalism Review, Collectors Weekly and KCRW.
Based in New Orleans, he salvages letterpress printing equipment from defunct print shops and uses it for custom publishing projects that combine several printing processes into artful, small-run editions.
Before moving south he lived in Cleveland, where he co-founded The Language Foundry, an independent performance space and micro publishing house for local and touring poets and musicians. It published broadsides, audio works and books, including Charlotte Mann's Hotel Poem, a collection of film photographs of poets that Cleveland Scene named Book of the Year.
He has taught graduate-level writing at Tulane University and English at Delgado Community College, holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of New Orleans and a BA in literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and studied preservation at the Tulane School of Architecture.
Greyt Quote
“Spend a little ink today.”
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Location
SPACES
2900 Detroit Ave, Cleveland, OH, 44113
SPACES is a contemporary art space founded in 1978 by artists, for artists, when experimental and non-commercial work had few places to be shown. Its story begins on May 25, 1978, when founder James Rosenberger called together 35 artists interested in creating and presenting new art. SPACES bought its first permanent home on the Superior Viaduct in 1990 and today works from the Van Rooy Building in Hingetown, at West 29th Street and Detroit Avenue, a longtime gathering place for Cleveland's BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities. Alongside exhibitions and events it runs an international artist-in-residence program, and in 2023 it was commissioner and co-curator of the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
About this event
For years, Joseph Makkos salvaged letterpresses and boxes of rare type from local print shops. He was trawling through Craigslist one day in 2013 when he came upon an ad for a “historic newspaper collection.” Hours later, he had become the proud owner of a Times-Picayune archive from 1885 up to 1930, a collection carefully preserved in some 30,000 airtight tubes.
The trove had originally been part of the newspaper holdings of the British Library. This once vast archive of newspapers from throughout the world was scattered and largely pulped in the late 1990’s, a tragic story that features prominently in Double Fold, Nicholson Baker’s book decrying the routine destruction of original newsprint and old books. Inspired by other print conservation efforts, Makkos launched New Orleans DNA to not only preserve his newspapers but also nurture an appreciation for their true pricelessness.