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Typography Tuesday

BEN FRANKLIN’S CASLON

This year marks the 300th anniversary of James Franklin’s truly independent-minded newspaper The New-England Courant, employing his younger brother Benjamin as an apprentice, and to which the 16-year-old Ben clandestinely wrote letters in the persona of "Silence Dogood," a middle-aged widow. These letters also had an independent streak, which did not sit well with James when he discovered it was all a ruse, as he was already in a lot of hot water with the government over his challenging periodical. In 1723, Benjamin ran away to Philadelphia, and a year later traveled to London to continue training as a printer. It was here that Franklin became interested in the art of typefounding. Most types being used at the time in both England and the Colonies were of Dutch origin, as England’s typefounding industry was meager and sub-par, and there were no type founders in America at all.

The great English type designer William Caslon, who would alter Britain’s typographic landscape, was just beginning his career at this time, and Franklin may have been familiar with Caslon’s work, as Franklin’s English employer James Watts partially funded Caslon’s enterprise. Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1726 to start his own printing house, for which he imported English-made (mainly those from the foundry of Thomas James) and Dutch types. Two years after Franklin launched his Poor Richard’s Almanack, William Caslon published his famous specimen sheet in 1734. In 1737, Franklin introduced Caslon typefaces in his Pennsylvania Gazette, beginning a trend in American printing that established Caslon fonts as the typeface of America.

#Typography Tuesday #typetuesday #Benjamin Franklin #James Franklin #William Caslon #Caslon type #Poor Richard's Almanack #David Hall #P22 Type Foundry #Franklin Caslon #18th century type #18th century printers

Typography Tuesday

HWT BERNICE

HWT Bernice is an ornament font system designed for the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum by the noted Canadian designer Marian Bantjes for the Museum’s Hamilton Wood Type Legacy Project which enlists internationally-recognized designers to create original designs for wood type and digital font production. Thus far, eight typefaces have been designed for the project which are named after individuals associated with Hamilton’s history. Bernice is named for retired Hamilton type trimmer Bernice Schwahert.

The examples shown here are from a small type specimen booklet for HWT Bernice designed by James Grieshaber and produced by the Rochester, N.Y., P22 Type Foundry in an edition of 1,500 copies in 2020, showcasing the many applications for HWT Bernice. Bantjes designed a set of six simple ornaments that can be used to stamp contemporary border designs in wood type. The P22 digital version of the font “allows designers to assemble these six base shapes into a multitude of ornaments, borders, and patterns by accessing flipped and rotated variations of these shapes, which are all accessible in the font as simple keystrokes.”

Here’s how the digital font works:

#Typography Tuesday #typetuesday #HWT Bernice #Marian Bantjes #Bernice Schwahert #Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum #Hamilton Wood Type Museum #Hamilton Wood Type Legacy Project #P22 Type Foundry #James Grieshaber #Typography Tuesday #21st century type #women type designers #type designers

Typography Tuesday

On this first #Typography Tuesday of the year, we begin the New Year with American printer and type designer Frederic Goudy’s Goudy Thirty font. Designed between 1942 and 1945, this was the last typeface Goudy designed before his death in 1947. In fact, the design was commissioned by Lanston Monotype to be used only after Goudy’s passing as a way to commemorate him. The typeface, a “Gothicized” Roman, was not produced until 1953 and was never commercially successful, but many private press printers seem to have taken a shine to it, and it is currently available as a digital font through P22 Type Foundry. Why is it named “Thirty”? Apparently, “thirty” is a newspaper trade term that signifies “end of story.” As Alexander Lawson, a long-time professor of Graphic Arts at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), wrote in his essay on Goudy Thirty, “Anatomy of a Type,”

Now, after five centuries, we may have come to the end of he road as far as the design of new metal types is concerned, It is fitting that the last font of America’s great type designer is a letter in the spirit of the 15th century, a period which he loved so well and to which he returned for inspiration in so many of his types.

The images presented here are from the fine-press publication A Goudy Memoir: Essays by and about America’s Great Type Designer Frederic W. Goudy, printed in 1987 at the Yellow Barn Press in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in an edition of 150 copies. The Goudy Thirty type display above was set at Mackenzie & Harris in San Francisco, while Goudy’s statement “The Type Speaks” was handset in 18 point Goudy Thirty by Yellow Barn’s proprietor Neil Shaver, and hand-printed by him on dampened Rives paper on a Vandercook Universal III. The titling is set in Goudy Text, a Gothic typeface Goudy designed in 1928 based on the types used in Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible of 1454/55. The large initial that begins the statement was drawn by Goudy in 1932 for a Christmas card he issued that year. The Arts and Crafts-style pressmark is that of Goudy’s own Village Press, which he founded with his wife Bertha and American designer Will Ransom and ran from 1903 to 1939. The frontispiece photo of Goudy at the press was provided to Shaver by RIT.

View other works printed by Neil Shaver at the Yellow Barn Press.

View our other posts that feature types by Fred Goudy.

View our other Typography Tuesday posts.