Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite

We were approached by Peter Dean to recreate a virtually unknown but hugely influential print: the Victorian circus poster that had inspired John Lennon to write Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite for the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. No copies of the 1843 original existed so many hours of detective work scrutinising a blurred photograph were needed to ascertain the posters’ scale, and from there identifying individual fonts, sizes, letter- and line-spacing.

From our type library we were able to set a forme that matched the vast majority of the original fonts and, together with Andy English’s wood engravings, achieve an extremely accurate reproduction. The edition of 1,967 posters was printed on our hand-pull Albion press which took over six months.

New North Press artisan letterpress print & design studio

single.php