Berlin Lincut Map

Description

The Berlin Map

After finishing a few earlier city maps, I wanted a bigger challenge, and a city with real history behind it. Berlin kept pulling me in, so in 2010 I booked a ticket and went for two months to find the map on foot.

I stayed at John’s Cosy Jungle Hostel for a month, then rented an apartment for the second month with an American friend I’d made at the hostel. I walked the city every day. I rode every U-Bahn station, photographing the typography along the way, and you’ll find those letterforms carried into the map. I also traced the line of the Berlin Wall. Walking around, you can still see its remnants marked in the ground, and that stayed with me, so I carved it into the map as a single continuous line, without one break.

Back in the UK, I spent a long time on the layout, leaving the main roads as open space and keeping the places I’d found worth including. Then I worked out how big the block had to be and ordered the largest sheet of lino I could get, 1.74 × 3.4 metres. The map i’m selling here is one of the smaller ones as i cut the edges down as i felt like it was just as interesting at this smaller size and was more likely to fit on some peoples walls.

Finding somewhere to carve it was its own struggle. Here in Reading, I came across Jelly, a local charity that supports artists, and they gave me a studio in the market place for five months. Knowing the clock was ticking, I carved seven days a week, twelve to sixteen hours a day, for five months without a day off. There’s a time-lapse of it here.

One detail I’m quietly proud of: after cutting around every letter, I cleared the background in strokes all pointing towards the TV Tower, so the grain of the lino runs to the centre. You’d never catch it from across a room, but up close it’s there.

The first print happened at my London show, and by luck Erik Spiekermann turned up the day before, while I was inking up. We tried a big roller loaded with wet sand, which didn’t work at all, so we printed it by hand with large serving spoons. At the private view I invited people to rub the back of the paper and help pull the print. We attempted ten or twelve, only a couple came out, and this is the one that did.

That’s the story done. What’s missing for a product page is the buying side — whether this is the print itself for sale or the block, the paper, the edition, the price. Say the word and I’ll add a short spec block at the end, or leave it as pure story if the commerce sits elsewhere on the page.