In Barcelona hobbies are expensive and nowadays it seems to be difficult to find places that don’t cost an arm and a leg to cultivate your passion. But there are hollows, basements or, in this case, bunkers where some crazy people cultivate interests and history outside the world as in a time capsule.
That’s what Bunker Type does , a basement in a small street in Vallcarca where Jesús Moretín keeps a printing press where he publishes as it was published in the early twentieth century.
The professor hidden in a bunker
Jesús Moretín is a teacher from La Massana who has another passion: antique printing. To cultivate it he has found this place, a basement in Vallcarca, which is just that, a bunker where he can hide so that time does not pass among tools for which, precisely, time does not pass.
Bunker Type started with a couple of machines 15 years ago, “as a small workshop with 4 tools and 4 alphabets”. Fifteen years later it is still alive for no apparent reason, since, as Moretín explains, “the fact that people do not print with this system is because it is neither profitable nor does it make much sense”, because, “if you have to do a text or a paragraph, and you have to spend an hour and a half and then decide that it does not look good because you have to change the typography, spend an hour and a half to save it all and start again, it is not a very good system.
Still, Bunker Type is just that, an artistic haven, where Moretín now makes creative prints from tools that weren’t really meant to do that. For example, they have now released a book for young children with Òscar Dalmau, where retro aesthetics are key.
The process is beautiful but slow. On the plate the solid lead types are placed in order, carefully, adding pieces to mark spaces and respecting the laws of the old printing presses, where everything goes slowly and a page can take an hour to make, and then pass it through the lathe and start printing.
The printing shop is not open to the public, because in the end it is like an extension of Moretín’s living room, but to go there, talk to him or propose a project you only have to write to him and he will be delighted to receive you.