Tis the Season

In addition to Typographic Curiosities 18, the March APA bundle delivered this seasonal reminder from Colorado's Bird Dog Press. Besides the cherry blossoms and other harbingers of Spring, the warmer weather means the shop is finally thawing out. Though we still print during the winter, it's a much more pleasant experience when the space heater isn't choking and coughing just trying to chase away the chill. The heater will soon get a deserved rest and a long summer vacation. Bon voyage!

Type is Art

Need a quick lunchtime diversion while dining al desko? Try your hand at Type is Art. The website lets users explore typography by experimenting with the 21 parts that make up roman letterforms. A simple interface lets you take a descender (or serif, or stem, or shoulder, or ear, or arm*...), scale it and rotate it to your heart's content. Then you can combine it with other letter parts until you're satisfied with your typographic masterpiece. Or at least until your lunch break is over.

* Riffing on the anthropomorphic naming of many letter parts, the above menagerie is drawn from the site's user-created gallery. The aggressive bugger on the left is mine.

RUN DC

Plastered to the side of a Washington Hispanic newspaper box is this image of the president as Darryl McDaniels, AKA D.M.C. An embedded DC flag replaces the M. T-shirts with a similar image have been around since the inauguration, but this version's sourcing is more aggressive than most. In this one poster alone there are at least a half dozen bits and pieces sampled from other work. Hmmm, kinda like a Run-DMC tune. How cool would this look as a letterpressed poster?

Tinker, tinker, tinker

The March bundle from the Amalgamated Printer's Association arrived last week and contained the usual mix of printed pieces, spanning the spectrum from novice to professional. APA members send samples of their work to all the other members at least 4 times a year. Each month every member receives around 50 pieces of letterpress matter printed by fellow APAers. It's a wonderful way to see the work of new printers, as well as marvel at the skills of those old hands who have bridged so many generations of printing technology.

What caught my eye in this bundle was a lavishly illustrated and impeccably produced booklet entitled Typographic Curiosities 18. I'll let the colophon tell the details:

The series Typographic Curiosities has been done intermittently over the past 45 years by Richard L. Hopkins. Subject matter has ranged widely, but always related to hot metal type and/or typesetting. It is Monotype composed and letterpress printed at the Hill & Dale Private Press and Typefoundry, Box 263, Terra Alta, West Virginia 26764.

This installment is titled Finishing the Work of an Unknown Designer and details the arrival of a package of ornament matrices sent to Rich by a long-time printer friend. Rich takes us through the process of how he analyzes the mats to divine the intention of the designer. What were they to be used for? Were they meant to go together or were they successive variations on a single design?

The layout is simple, revelatory, and generously illustrated. But what's most telling is the fundamental approach Rich takes: physically handling the cast pieces. He reminds us that it's okay to take a dingbat (or a letterform or cut) and play with it. Hold it in your hand and study it. Rotate it around, try it as a border, or combine it with multiples of itself in different arrangements. Do something unexpected with it. In fact, it's not just okay to try this, it's vital. It's how we dissect and rebuild.

It's a good lesson to remember in the shop. Why not combine some rarely-used dingbat set into a background pattern? How about doing the same with various widths of rule? What about using a numeral 9 as a lowercase g? Tinkering around in the shop is what makes us creative typesetters, analytical thinkers, and better printers. Rich should know; he's one of the best.

A different kind of composing stone

Like peanut butter and chocolate or The Captain and Tennille, occasionally there comes along a combination that seems so natural, you wonder why no one had thought of it before. This is not quite one of those instances, but a dream I had last night did offer an inventive combination of two of my interests.

I dreamed I was curling, but instead of delivering the usual granite stones, I was throwing wood type. (I imagine throwing wood type down a sheet of ice is easier than running a granite stone through the press.) From what I recall of the dream, I was playing pretty well, too. Maybe we're looking at a new Olympic sport for 2014?

VOTE D*E*E

Mary E. found an old printing plate that was passed down through her family. The plate shows a proud Donald Endres. And why would he not be proud? -- he's sporting a smart herringbone suit jacket. The plate was probably made in preparation for his run at an elected district judgeship. Because no campaign signs survive, we decided to make some for ol' Don.

On the proof press, we first ran the plate of Don using a transparent cyan(ish) ink. Then we set VOTE in 20-line Clarendon wood type; DEE (his initials) is set in 16-line wood type of varying fontage. The stars and rules are lead. We inked the wood and lead with brown and red ink and printed atop Don's noggin. We printed on several colors of French Paper Co. Muscletone stock. The completed piece measure about 12 x 16. I'm sure Mary will send you one in exchange for a generous campaign donation.

The day the Pilot came home

My midlife crisis could've been worse.

Sure, I was unemployed, recovering from losing a finger, and trying hard to ignore all the work that needed to be done around the house. But jumping in the Beetle, driving to Indianapolis, and buying a letterpress was better than purchasing a Maserati. It was a bit cheaper, too.

I met Dave Churchman in his shop near downtown Indianapolis in November 2007. Dave is an icon in the letterpress world, and his shop is crammed floor to rafters with all manner of junk: type, leads, cuts, press parts, paper, and spare bits of every conceivable printing machine since 1880. And amazingly, he and his wife know where everything is. It's like one of those really good hardware stores: not only does the guy know exactly that whatsithoozy you're looking for, he can put his finger right on it.

And so it was with Dave, who equipped me with just about everything I needed to start Duckpin Press. Chiefly, the press. It's an old style Chandler & Price Pilot tabletop press. Though it difficult to date exactly, it's probably circa 1920 or so. The original sales catalog tells me, "It will earn a profit in any job office." Can't say that for a Maserati. I snapped this picture of proud papa Dave -- sending his Pilot off into the world -- before packing 'er up for the trip back to DC.

As I write this, most of the rust has been abated, new rollers attached, and she's humming along in the job office. Now I just gotta figure out how to make that profit...