IN the background are two large words in natural colours, scrunched artistically into the small space of the postage stamp: “Magna Carta”. Slashed across them, at the same angle as pikestaffs carried into battle, are words of protest in fiery, angry red: “Freedom, Justice, Liberty”.

This British stamp, released to commemorate the millennium, is perhaps the most widely-known work of Darlington-born letterpress artist Alan Kitching, although examples of his work from throughout his 50-year career have just been compiled into a colourful, coffee-table book. As a world-renowned letterpress artist, Alan makes pictures out of words, as the 1999 stamp shows.

The Royal Mail commissioned 48 British artists, including David Hockney and Peter Blake, for the year-long issue of stamps with the brief of covering 1,000 years of British history and achievements.

“They portioned it up, and I got the Magna Carta because it was to do with words," says this man of letters. “I went to see the original in the British library on calfskin, and I got a modern translation of it, a very daunting document which I read and read and read, and then went through with a highlighter, marking the different bits. It was all about protest in 1215, and so I tret it like a protest banner.”

His last verb belies his northern roots. He was born in 1940 into a family of North Road railwaymen. His father was a joiner and his grandfather a signwriter – “I remember him talking about Gill Sans, which was the typeface the LNER used for all its station signs and posters”, he says. This clean typeface, without any twiddly bits on the letters, was created by Eric Gill in 1928 and adopted by the LNER the following year.

Alan left Gladstone Street School, aged 14, and knew his family’s footsteps, and the town’s heavy industry, was not for him.

“I was asked what I wanted to do and I said poster artist, but in Darlington in 1954-55, there wasn’t much call for poster artists,” he says. The day after his 15th birthday, his teacher, Mr Kay, took him for an interview to become an apprentice compositor at JW Brown and Son’s printers in Post House Wynd.

“It was a ramshackle two-storey building and you went up two flights of rickety wooden stairs, very Dickensian, and on the top floor was the composing room,” he says. “There were, in those days, about five printers in Darlington, and Browns was a jobbing printer: wedding invitations, dance tickets, business cards, letterheads and posters. It was all set in metal and printed on a press."

Printing in Darlington in the 1950s hadn't really come that far since the 1470s when William Caxton introduced the printing press to Britain.

Alan continues: “But Will Brown, the son, ran the shop and knew the value of typography. He used to encourage me with bit of proofing paper and a stub of pencil.”

Specialist printing magazines were delivered which hinted at a more artistic way of presenting information, and Alan saw for the first time the work of a Swiss typographer, Jan Tschichold.

“It was very exciting and I realised that there was more to it than just setting papers and wedding invitations – what he did was dynamic and inspirational,” says Alan. “Swiss typography looked exciting on the page, the use of type and space and rules and the asymmetrical look – it wasn’t centred as we did in Darlington.”

Three years of nightclasses at Darlington Technical College were followed by three years of day release at Middlesbrough college until the apprenticeship was complete. “I knew I wanted to be a graphic designer,” he says. “I was ambitious. When I arrived in London there were five graphic designers. Today there are five million. It was a leap in the dark. I got on the steam train and came down and never really went back.”

He became a print technician at Watford College of Technology and then founded a design studio in Covent Garden while teaching at the Royal College of Art.

“I started my second life in 1988 with letterpress,” he says. “Computers were coming in to graphic design, and I was in my late 40s. I knew I had to do something to progress, and I decided I would return to what I knew.”

Letterpress was what Browns did in Post House Wynd and what Caxton did in the 15th Century: metal letters covered in ink or paint and then pressed onto dampened paper. The Browns kept it very functional – place, time and date in straight lines quietly informing the reader of all he needed to know – but Alan made it artistic with different colours, shapes and sizes shouting messages at the viewer.

With computer design throwing old-fashioned printers out of business, Alan was able to collect old hot metal letters and hand-fed presses and turn the creation of posters and covers into an artform. He has worked for the National Theatre, the British Library, Tate Modern, Penguin Books and the Guardian, as well as the Royal Mail, and has had solo shows in London and Barcelona and exhibited at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. He’s an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Art and a visiting professor at the University of the Arts London.

To coincide with the launch of the book, there’s been an exhibition of his work at Somerset House in London. The exhibition is going around the country and should come to Mima in Middlesbrough later this year.

“At the moment,” says Alan, “I’m doing a poster for the London Underground to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the introduction of the Johnston alphabet.”

It sounds a little obscure until you realise that Edward Johnston’s typeface is the one used for underground station nameboards and on the tube map – millions of people see it and use it everyday to find out instantly where they are and where they want to be because it is so clean and cleverly legible.

“Johnston was a medievalist calligrapher and he was a fantastic letterer,” says Alan. “His letter forms are perfect, derived from Roman lettering, and his letters and spaces have been used uniquely by the underground.”

His poster commemorating the 1916 introduction of the Johnston typeface will go up on underground stations this summer and, just as none of the millions of underground tube users know the name of the man who devised the letters they look at, few will know the name of the man who designed the poster. But for Alan Kitching, the underground railway poster brings his career almost full circle. He points out that Johnston taught, and influenced, Eric Gill who developed the Gill Sans typeface that Alan’s grandfather used on the overground railways back in Darlington.

n Alan Kitching: A Life in Letterpress includes a biography by John L Walters and a photo essay by Philip Sayer as well as a lifetime of Alan’s own works. It has just been published in a Collectors Edition, limited to 200 copies, for £200, and a Special Edition at £75. A Bookshop Edition at £40 will be available next March. For further details, go to the publisher’s website, laurenceking.com