Today is Koppermaandag in the Netherlands, ‘cupping monday’. The first Monday after 6 January, when graphics artists and printers show their skills by making something: a Koppermaandag print.

Traditionally, since the early 1400s, Koppermaandag was the day that members of all guilds would have a festive day for the new year. ‘Kopperen’ (‘cupping’) as a verb comes from kop (cup) and stands for feasting and drinking. The tradition waned in the 18th century with the dissolution of the guilds, and only the printers kept doing it, until that too faded. Since World War II several groups of graphics artists and printers have taken up the tradition again. That is how I know of it: E’s great-uncle was a member of the Groninger group of artists De Ploeg and in 1962 a founder of the Grafisch Centrum Groningen. There they made their Koppermaandag prints. The 1965 print was drawn by him and shows him flattened under the printing press.

Last June during a workshop for Y’s birthday with Roy Scholten in the Grafisch Atelier Hilversum I saw their Koppermaandag prints. The next day I marked Koppermaandag 2026 in my calendar, with the intention of doing something for it by myself.

For me knowledge work has always been artisanal in nature. It is a form of professional work where your tools are personal, where your path is your own. Autonomy within networks, learning in networks, creating in and with networks. This makes personal knowledge plus your approach to maintaining it and learning important (usually dubbed personal knowledge management, or pkm). Having your own system for your personal knowledge is both what allows you to create your professional autonomy (your insights woven into connections that have meaning for you), and what ensures your continued professional autonomy (you take it with you when you go someplace else).

For today I wanted to combine those things. Knowledge work as artisanal profession. This links it back to the original guilds. Second the personal aspect of it, and third making something by hand to print, like the card I made (be)for(e) Christmas. The latter links it to the modern Koppermaandag tradition of graphics printers and artists.

I made a card, with the text (P)KM and the number 26. KM for Koppermaandag as well as for Knowledge Management and the P for personal. My personal koppermaandag, and personal knowledge management. The background is a network. The nodes are concepts, things, actors. The connections between them are the insights that grew from combining them, forming a neighbourhood and context for each node. Something I associate both with Bruno Latour‘s ANT and George Siemens‘ connectivism. The frame around it is not closed, and some connections cross it, because while always defined and bounded in each moment a personal knowledge network is not enclosed nor stagnant.

The design I cut in lino, in what must be the first time since primary school. Then I printed it on our small press. The letters and the lines are wonky. That does make it an accurate demonstration of my capabilities though, as per the tradition of Koppermaandag.

Happy (personal) Koppermaandag!