This post strays off from our daily formula, and it’s a quick glimpse at a, let’s say, “interesting” printing process. Looking to create a type specimen for their blackletter typeface, Fakir, the daring folks at Underware thought that a good idea would be to create a book, titled Book of War, printed in the author’s blood. A little more on the genesis of the idea:

In the first year of existence of the blackletter Fakir, activities around the typeface arose with the theme of voluntary suffering. The ‘let’s suffer together’ deal, that kind of work. A blackletter ain’t the typeface with the highest legibility. Then Ruud Linssen crossed our mind. This Dutch author, poet and journalist is the perfect person to write about voluntary suffering.

Underware has a detailed account of the whole process on their website, a very worthwhile read, although perhaps not for the squirmish! And Kevin Lo reports as a happy customer.

But that’s not all in this week’s blood-printing news!

Swedish Black Metal band Watain has also printed a poster with their own blood, although this one was more of simply adding blood to existing ink like one would add lime to salad dressing, rather than making ink from scratch, no pun intended. The process shots in this project are a little more bloody. Steve Heller reports in full. [Thanks to Jason Parry for this tip].