One-of-a-Kind Stamp - old style, new idea

Two young Taipei designers are producing a unique type of stamp, making use of the old typesetting method common in Taiwan before the arrival of the computer age.

Stamps, or chops/seals as they’re also often called in English, are an essential part of living in Taiwan. A fact of life here is that and document that has not been thoroughly pummeled and left covered in angry – looking red welts – created using said stamps – is not worth the paper it’s written on. Taiwanese administration, and thus society in general, undoubtedly moves to the sound of a stamp, has his or her own personal name chop, the impression of which serves as one’s official signature on anything and everything that needs to be signed. In Taiwan, more stamping goes on in a single morning than does in as entire run of the musical Stomp.

The stamp that I told in my hand, though, is a far cry from the cheap, computer – carved stamps you can pick up for NT$50 at one of the many key – cutting stores around Taiwan. It’s also different from the embellished jade chops with characters and decorative arabesques carved by calligraphic masters for thousands of NT dollars apiece – though these give a similar sense of high officialdom to those using them, I’m sure.

No, this chop is unembellished apart from the simple grain on the gourd – shaped wooden handle and turquoise dapple pattern on the newly oxidizing copper of the base. It is also reassuringly heavy, and feels more like a blackjack than a piece of stationery. And, unlike traditional chops, the raised letters which serve to imprint one’s name onto paper are not carved from stone. The face of the stamp is, instead, made up of movable lead type – the kind used by the likes of Gutenberg or Caxton in old – fashioned printing.

I give it a spin, dipping it first in ink and then applying it to sheet of a thick handmade card. With a satisfying thunk, a block of rubicund lettering appears, debossed into the fibrous white background.

The designers of this strange instrument, who I have come to meet at their central Taipei studio, are Rick Wu and Kimberly Lin. Together they run the R is K Studio, producing items with a unique Taiwanese flavor on a cottage – industry scale. Though still in their twenties, both Rick and Kimberly have a design aesthetic that is not what one would think of as modern, though it’s certainly not old – fashioned, either. Rather, the two have an understanding of the value of history in giving a piece character, and this shows through in their designs, in which they often take old, used object and put them to a new purpose.

“History makes objects attractive,” says Kimberly, directing my attention to a bookcase with a back that is an ornate set of window bars, slightly worn and rusted. “These bars – who knows what their story is? A family might have hung clothes from them, or owned a cat that would squeeze through them. It’s because they have history that we find such objects desirable. When something experiences life, a sense of that life sticks around on it.”

Though the stamp itself is not made of reappropriated materials, the design and the concept are infused with history both recent and ancient – complex strands of influence, inspiration, and symbolism that have twined together over more than three millennia.

The initial idea for the stamp came to Kimberly when she attended a printing workshop at a nearby shop in one of the lanes off Taipei’s Taiyuan Road. Situated directly opposite the shop is one of the most fascinating stores in all of Taiwan – the Rixing Type Foundry – the last shop in Taiwan, and perhaps one of only a handful left in the world, that makes movable lead type. “The owner of the foundry, Chang Chieh-kuan, is really keen for people to learn about the old printing industry, and so we were encouraged to collaborate with him and make a product that would help introduce people to that culture, which has all but vanished,” explains Kimberly.

Printing and chop – making, by their very natures, share a common ancestry. Name chops first surfaced during the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BC), and were impressed into the wads of clay used seal important documents (stacks of bamboo sheets tied together with cord). After the invention of paper in 105 AD, chops were used to stamp officials’ names directly onto the documents themselves after being dipped in a paste made from crushed cinnabar. This practice may well have contributed to the invention of woodblock printing, in which entire pages of characters are carved into wooden blocks, covered in ink, and printed onto paper.

Movable type, which was invented in China around 1040 AD, remained somewhat of a novelty in Asia, due to the non – alphabetical nature of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese writing, until more advanced mechanical printing presses began to appear from Europe. Taiwan’s first printing press arrived on the island in 1881, donated by Scottish missionary Dr. James Laidlaw Maxwell, and the first mass – printed newspaper was distributed in 1885. By this stage, manual typesetting using individual letters was being replaced in the West by increasingly sophisticated methods of mechanical typesetting, which could cast entire lines of text with the push of a few buttons.

In Taiwan, though, again due to the vastly impractical number of characters in the Chinese language (over 100,000 by some counts), mechanical typesetting remained a pipe dream until well into the 20th century, with shops like the Rixing Type Foundry (which was established in the 1950s) receiving orders from a publisher and then painstakingly arranging the type by hand, sometimes compiling scripts of over one million words long from their stock of over ten million lead characters.

This has, of course, now all changed, and the stacks and stacks of lead characters at Riving are likely never again to be used to print a novel or a newspaper. Nowadays they are museum pieces more than anything else, and people buy the characters merely as curiosities.

Those who buy one of Rick and Kimberly’s stamps, however, will be among the few who can Rixing’s lead characters for their original purpose. After you purchase a stamp (wooden handle and copper base) at a shop (funfuntown or 324 Print Studio), you’re given directions to the Rixing Type Foundry on Taiyuan Road, where you pick out the characters you want, in your desired font of course, and are then directed to another shop (the Riyu Printing Company in Wanhua District), where a master typesetter sets your letters for you and fits them into the base of the stamp. This might seem like am impractical way of buying a stamp, but it has the benefit of obliging you to go on a journey to two of the oldest and most interesting neighborhoods in Taipei, Dadaocheng and Wanhua.

And there is one further thing that sets this stamp apart from the common name chop. It is not, as you may have thought, designed for providing one’s official signature. The 9 X 5.4cm size of the copper base makes it perfect for holding type to print another of Taiwan’s societal must – haves – the business card.

Business cards, like chops, are one of the cornerstones of Taiwanese society. Everyone has them – car mechanics, bartenders, ever Buddhist monks. In Taiwan, swapping business cards is as common as shaking hands. And the fact that Rick and Kimberly’s chop is designed to print business cards is yet another wink to history: In the very early days, chops were not used as stamps at all, but carried around the waist to be presented as evidence of one’s rank and office – very much the business cards of their time.

Rick and Kimberly’s stamp, than, represents something much greater than the sum of its parts. It is a meeting point of historical, cultural, and social conventions, a work of poetry in which the ancient ceremonial chop, suffused with all its pomp and circumstance, is infused with the stalwart rigor of the industrial print revolution.

For more information about Taiwan see the website:  http://eng.taiwan.net.tw/