Curator, Ellen Lupton: One of Zwart's most spectacular letterpress pieces is this 1923 advertisement for Vickers House. And the products being advertised are really ordinary. In the middle of the postcard, you see the words "zagen, boren, and vijlen"—saws, drills, and files. And all of those words end with the letter N and so you see the letter N, in green and in black, transitioning from a very narrow shape to getting wider and smaller and eventually becoming an H. So, in a way this little postcard is presenting a movie, like a moving image of letterforms changing and transforming as they move from top to bottom.
On the left side of the postcard, you see these little triangular, jaggy lines represent saw blades. And the sequence of circles going from small to large represents drill bits. And at the bottom, you see a pattern of diamonds that represents the texture of a metal file. Letterpress is a technology that is based on working with preexisting letterforms, rather than drawing letterforms by hand. So, he's using these wonderful abstract elements from the typesetting case to create these beautiful illustrations of simple industrial products. And this really became a hallmark of his work.