#st. brides

[racinated-dreams]

A project I've been very slowly picking at, a little tiny bit at a time, is the concept of a rules-lite, aesthetics-heavy, pen & paper RPG inspired by the St. Bride's computer game and Aristasian lore.

[typeworship]

Type Treasure

Over on TYPE Magazine’s blog, Paul Barnes explores a few of the hidden gems of the St. Bride Library, London in a article, The Treasure of St. Bride—Part II.

The concise article takes a look at a few of the punches, matrices, the molds that London’s preeminent type foundries used to create printing type between the 18th to the 20th centuries.  

Paul is a partner in Commercial Type and a trustee of St. Bride Library. 

You can also read about St. Bride’s unique collection of decorative Pouchée alphabets, here on Type Worship.

[typeworship]

Alphabet and Image Magazine

A few hastily taken snaps of this 1940s publication shown at the St. Brides ‘Type Tuesday’ event this week. They were picked from Reading University’s type and print archive by eye magazine’s Art Director, Simon Esterson, to show on the night.

Apart from the frayed, yellowed paper (which simply adds to their beauty) they could have been designed yesterday. I love them.

There are more photos of this post-war typography and visual arts publication over on Mike Dempsey’s Graphic Journey.

[typeworship]

St. Brides Printing Library: Letterpress and Typesetting

I spent this evening getting my hands dirty and running through the basics of typesetting at the St. Brides Typographic Library, London. I'd seen the process before and know the theory but I've never used a composing stick myself.

There's lots of little details & techniques to physically setting type well. Some unexpected observations after being hands-on are:

Navigating a case of type and knowing in which compartment each letter is stored takes a little while. (see top right image of a 'job' or 'jobbing' case). 

Being left-handed can make it a little more awkward to hold the compositing stick (unless you find a left-handed one)

Knowing the sizes of your Ems and Ens suddenly becomes very important to composing each line: spacers (or blanks) of various sizes and combinations are required to told each line of type tightly bound in the stick.

At small sizes composing the type is very fiddly. The time it takes while learning to set a full pages of dense type should not be underestimated.

Your fingers become coved in metal dust after a while. You won't get this from you keyboard.

[typeworship]

For the best letterpress workshops in the city, I found these two:

The Typography Workshop with Letterpress legend Alan Kitching.

Print Workshop at the fantastic St. Brides Foundation based close to historic printing centre FleetStreet.

[typeworship]

Original drawing of Gill Sans  c.1926

Last year I had the opportunity to spend some time at St. Brides typographic library in Clerkenwell, near Fleet Street, the historic birthplace of printing on London.

Nigel Roche, the Librarian, took us through Eric Gill’s original drawing of Gill Sans (pictured). The paper has discoloured over time making the corrections to the glyphs very clear. The grid is still visible together with Eric Gill’s signature.  It’s fascinating to see how the design evolved.

Apart from proportional changes (compared to the modern Monotype version overlaid), major design changes can be seen. The tail of the ‘a’ is straight in the drawing, and most of the vertical terminals are angled, most pronounced in the p and q.

Thanks to: St. Bride Library, Bride Lane, Fleet Street, London EC4Y 8EE and Nigel Roche.