Period Drama

Good God, is it November? we've been away for a while...
A last minute event of note:

The presentation that almost didn't happen!
The agony! The kvetching! The indecision!

T O N I G H T
Tuesday, November 17 at 7:00 PM
(free and open to the public) The Cooper Union Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography

Doug and I will participate in

Fan Letter:
26 Artists and Designers Present Their Favorite Letter or Typographic Character
Twenty-six local, national, and internationally-based designers and artists give a two-minute ode to an alphabet letter or typographic character.
These may range from multimedia presentations, performances, videos, stories, poems, animations, songs, stand-up comedy, rants, short plays, demonstrations, Gregorian chants, etc.
—however they choose to depict their letter.

Fan Letter is organized and emceed by Bruce Willen and Nolen Strals of Post Typography, authors of a new book from Princeton Architectural Press, Lettering & Type: Creating Letters and Designing Typefaces.

with a 2 minute mini-exegesis on the period
.

who's responsible for this?

Well, we'd like to think that the Handy Book might have something to do with this particular design approach by Jason Lee on Wired.com... We can't be sure. We are sure that visual conventions and design conceits used in artistic letterpress printing 120 years ago are showing up in print and digital form.
We've added to the digital pile with our temporary header design for the Unbeige design blog on mediabistro. Who knows how long it'll be up, but, for now—we like it.

Freaks of Fancy — A Webcast

Type! Ornament! Printing!
and nineteenth-century fancies...

An All-Live Webcast hosted by PRINT Magazine
with Your Authors

Thursday, July 23, 2009
4pm EST

You must register to participate...

More info at PRINT's web site

Type Revival

Herewith our list of studios, by no means comprehensive, that offer digital typefaces either based on originals designed in the nineteenth century or inspired by the period. We have included links when available, but almost all of the following can be purchased on myfonts.com

Archive Type

Not much information exists about Archive Type beyond its founding in 2005 and that it is based in, intriguingly, Slovenia. Seemingly moribund, even its appealing web site seems to have stalled around 2007. Nevertheless, the studio specializes in typefaces “found in old prints, books, and samples... with the imperfections all perfectly preserved.” In other words, the offerings are tastefully aged, even when the vintage types were not distressed and clean examples of the originals are still available. Such is the case with our favorite: Archive Tale, a revival designed in 2006. Originally designed by Herman Ihlenburg in 1874 for MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan and named Unique.

Canada Type

A “digital type solutions company” founded by Rebecca Alaccari and Patrick Griffin in 2004, the Toronto-based Canada Type designs custom fonts for clients in addition to retail typefaces. The expressive collection covers a good deal of twentieth century design from advertising brush faces, streamlined blackletters and updated deco to a serious foray into 70s-era blaxploitation funk. Our favorite: Treasury Platinum. Originally designed by Herman Ihlenburg for MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan in 1875 as Treasury Open.

Coffee Bin Fonts

Folk artist and designer Billy Jacobs of Navarre, Ohio, is inspired by 19th-century American advertising and printing ephemera. Our favorite: Drugstore, digitized in 2006. Originally designed by Herman Ihlenburg in 1881 for MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan and called Obelisk.

FontMesa

Photographer and designer Michael Hagemann of Naperville, Illinois, creates typefaces in the Bonanza Style of Wild West Tuscan split ends. Our favorite: Tenderfoot, 2005

Intellecta Design

We find this among the most fascinating of contemporary type foundries. The mysterious proprietors Iza W and Paulo W share development activities in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil. Intellecta “searches historical churches, museums and similar institutions to develop handwriting and other fonts from old documents.” Paulo is a self-taught designer with what appears to be excellent taste in expressive vintage typography. The Intellecta blog is a curious mix of inspiring type specimens, incunabula, Japanese manga and illustrations from bodice-ripping fiction. Our favorite (not an easy choice): Zooth Shaded, by Iza W, 2007

HIH

HIH, or Hand-in-Hand, is a font shop in New Britain, Connecticut. Owner and designer Tom won us over when he wrote: "I think the 19th century (more exactly, from 1815 through 1914) is the most exciting in the history of typography — the teenage years, messy, conflicted and full of the discovery of the raw power being unleashed." For this we will forgive him his dalliance with the Art Nouveau. Our favorite: the orientalist Pekin, designed by Ernst Larschke in 1888, digitized in 2005. Solotype (see below) offers a slightly different version of Pekin.

Hoefler Frere-Jones

The Ralph Lauren of type houses, a fount of tasteful fonts and typographic intellect salted with an appreciation of American vernacular practicality. Proper typefaces in their Sunday best tempted by the the shadowy divertissements of old Gotham. How to describe this all-around admirable enterprise? Begun in 1989 (how else could they have snapped up "typography.com”) and based in New York. Our favorite, Knox, is faceted like a fancy shoppe sign and is influenced by Alexander Nesbitt’s 16 Line Pica Octagon wood type (1838)

Nick's Fonts

Nick Curtis is a prolific type designer and revivalist in Alexandria, Maryland. He credits his early interest in typefaces to his discovery of a binder from JCS Typographers of Dallas one fateful afternoon in 1962. Our favorite: Groove Thang, 2005, is a redrawing of Dado, designed by Herman Ihlenburg for MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan in 1882.

Richard Beatty / The Beatty Collection

Since he discovered the Mac at age 53, Mr. Beatty's collection has grown to include 76 originals, 327 translations, and 57 sets of borders and ornaments. We like one of his more ornate offerings: Recherché, 1991

Solotype

Dan X. Solo's biography reads like nineteenth-century boy's adventure tale. Born in 1928, Dan was a child printer, radio actor, magician, and collector of antique type. In the 1970s Dan designed 30 books of alphabets from his collection for Dover Publications. He has digitized some of his collection and sells them as Solotype. The last we have learned (2005), Dan and wife were presenting a mind-reading act on cruise ships. Does anyone have an update on this amazing man? Our favorite Solotype offering? Master Script, redrawn by Dan Solo in 2001. Originally designed by Thomas MacKellar in 1886 for MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan.

Spiece Graphics

Jim Spiece of Fort Wayne, Indiana enjoys reviving antique typefaces, drawing retro commercial-art style logos, and hunting vintage type in flea markets and dusty library basements. Our favorite: Astoria Antique Light, by Jim Spiece, 2003. Reportedly modeled on a typeface used with the color plates in Owen Jones' The Grammar of Ornament.

Wooden Type Fonts

While wood type rarely appeared in artistic printing, it is hard to resist its scale and rough-hewn expressiveness. Jordan Davies of South Hero, Vermont offers quite a few revivals and some original designs. Our favorite: Number 515 - Black, originally designed in 1887 and digitized by Jordan Davies in 2005

If you would like to find original names and dates for many nineteenth-century type revivals, these books are helpful:

Nineteenth Century Ornamented Typefaces, Nicolete Gray (University of California Press, 1976)

American Wood Type, 1828-1900, Rob Roy Kelly (Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1969)
MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan, Typographic Tastemakers of the Late Nineteenth Century, Doug Clouse (Oak Knoll Press, 2008)

The Solotype Catalog of 4,147 Display Typefaces, Dan X. Solo (Dover Publications, 1992)

Design Like It's 1885

How does a contemporary graphic designer use antique elements?

Early this year, eminent printer John Randle invited me to design and print an insert for Matrix, the journal for printers and bibliophiles he publishes at the Whittington Press in the UK. John wanted to supplement a review of my book MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan, Typographic Tastemaker of the Late Nineteenth Century and requested a composition of type and ornament from the great American type foundry. During an energetic and inventive twenty-five-year span at the end of the nineteenth century, MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan patented fancy type and ornaments that appeared in artistic printing around the world. Luckily, the type collection at Bowne & Co., Stationers at the South Street Seaport Museum includes many MacKellar types.

Without slavishly imitating artistic printing, I wanted to try a bit of typotecture, as well as some of the more complex MacKellar diagonal ornaments. Here is the process that led to the card appearing soon in Matrix 28. - DC

The rough layout using dummy type sketched from a catalog at Bowne & Co., Stationers

The first interpretation of the sketch, using the following MacKellar typefaces: Giraffe, Broadgauge, Kitcat, Relievo No. 2, and Dado; as well as MacKellar combination ornaments. The resulting composition was too small.

Apple to the rescue. With a scan of the first proof, I built a structure of digital ornaments around it in Photoshop.

Back at Bowne & Co., I approximated the Photoshop layout as closely as possible in metal, using geometric ornaments and the typeface Ronaldson Condensed.

The lockup was a weighty mass of lead.

The final card was printed on a Vandercook press in black ink on light blue paper. Many thanks to Robert Warner and Fela Cortés at Bowne & Co. and also to Barbara Henry and John Randle.

Bright and Happy Homes

Each tableau is composed of individual ornaments and borders.
Here a "chinaman" on stilts makes his way amidst temples and Aesthetic style vases.

Doug picked this book up on a road trip to MassMoCa several years ago... I was too busy dithering over some vintage umbrellas and quilting squares to realize just what a find he'd gotten. Bright and Happy Homes, a “household guide and companion” published in 1882 by the pseudonymous Peter Parley, Jr., weighs in at an impressive 491 pages. Its goals are just as ambitious; the author and editor state that book is to entertain small children, provide instruction for older boys and girls, and to create a book that adults will also find attractive and educational. An amalgamation of text and images both original and culled from various sources, the book offers advice on everything from the "management of marriages", and the death of children, to how to make an attractive rustic letter holder.

What was immediately fascinating was that each chapter opener was a different miniature extravaganza of effort.

[Doug takes it from here] Layouts were printed from engravings as well as hand-set metal type and ornament. The compositors (typesetters) added value in the extremely labor-intensive chapter openers, built almost entirely from elements patented and sold by the American type foundry MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan.

The sentimental nature of much of the text, the recycled engravings that sometimes strain to relate to the essays, the style of binding design, and the low-quality text stock are typical of nineteenth-century gift books. Bright and Happy Homes was not in good shape when I found it near Pittsfield, MA; the spine was falling apart and pages were loose. Although condition affected the price, at the time $40 still seemed a little high. In retrospect, however, the book was worth it since it led to a Master's thesis and book.

A temple of type

One conceit nineteenth century compositors (typesetters) reached for periodically was the "building" or "temple"—architectonic constructions created entirely out of individual pieces of metal type and ornament. (See some wonderful examples of early "typotecture"* on Sheaff Ephemera) The process of composing type for letterpress printing was inherently linear and easily lent itself to compositions like this.

Here, heavy symmetrical pilasters corral an expressive arrangement of type and ornament typical of the late 1880s and early 1890s. Note the small naked child who swings in duplicate from "pin" ornaments, and, at bottom, the barking terrier which pokes a "hole" in the page. The typeface is Mikado, a fresh choice at the time of this design (1886). Buoyant to the point of being unmoored, the face ignores a baseline and sprouts both thin tendrils and thick medieval crossbars. Gilbert & Sullivan's immensely popular comic opera The Mikado, after which the face was named, had opened in New York only in 1885, and continued to fuel the ongoing enthusiasm for all things Japanese (although whether this type resembles anything remotely Japanese is open to interpretation). Tastemakers of the time associated Japanese crafts with refined sensibilities and personal vision, antidotes to the threats of industrialization and cheap, mass-manufactured goods. Ironically, Mikado freezes the carefree lines and quirky forms of "artistic" handwriting into a mass-produced metal type. The combination here of Mikado with bits of trompe l'oeil and the older ornaments that create the frame epitomizes the eclecticism of artistic printing.

The compositor/designer of this piece, Ed. H. McClure of Buffalo, NY, was also the dyspeptic editor of the American Printers Specimen Exchange, an invaluable collection of American artistic printing of the time. McClure harassed enough printers to submit samples to the Exchange to produce four volumes between 1886 and 1890. This example, from Volume 1, required six or seven passes through a press.

* Distantly related to, but not to be confused with, Typotecture: Typography as Architectural Imagery, an exhibition and catalog at the Museum für Gestaltung, Zürich, 2000.