#typetuesdays

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

For this Typography Tuesday we are sharing some excerpts from Woody Leslie’s book Parsely. The artist describes the book as “a verbo-visual artist's book that uses words alone to both narrate and illustrate a story, ostensibly about the neighbor's parsley being eaten by some caterpillars under my watchful eye.”

The story seems simple enough, but as the reader progresses through the book they are slowed by the ever increasing footnotes, vocabulary definitions, and additional text that squiggles and juts out from the main text filling each page more and more.

“It’s a thirty-second story that takes nearly thirty minutes to read, and even longer to fully unpack. In the end, the book is a meditation on words and language, the caterpillars and parsley simply acting as our guides.”

Reading this book is like visualizing someone telling a story. One can imagine the main text as someone talking, but all the additional text shows that there is more to the story that may or may not be told. Similar to the oral tradition of storytelling this book will not read the same the second, third, or fifteenth time through.

Woody uses different fonts to help tell the tale. “The text is set in Perpetua and Gill Sans Light, with sprinklings of Stymie. Quotational assistance from Baskerville, Cochin, Helvetica, Gil Sans Ultra Bold, Iowan Old Style and Zapfino.”

It is a limited edition of 200, offset printed by Woody Leslie at the Center for Book, Paper, & Print at Columbia College Chicago. It was published by Large Home Tiny Idea in Chicago in 2016.

View more Typography Tuesday posts. 

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

The Imprint, published from January to November 1913, was a periodical that featured many aspects of the printing industry. Among the editors of the publication were F. Ernest Jackson, an English lithographer who designed posters for the London Underground from 1913 - 1925, and the master calligrapher, Edward Johnston, who designed the san-serif Johnston typeface and the roundel used in the London Underground signage. 

In the first issue there was a challenge put forth to printers and designers “Mr. Gordon Selfridge offers through The Imprint a prize of TEN GUINEAS for the best designed Letter Heading for his store.” 

The images above are a selection of entries that appeared in the final issue of The Imprint from November 1913. The last image shown here was the winner.

“The Prize of Ten Guineas has been awarded to Messrs. Mutries, Ltd., 167 Strand, W.C. An enormous number of headings were received - some of which are reproduced in the following pages - and though many of them showed great dexterity, none were considered entirely suitable for the purpose. No further prizes have therefore been awarded.”

Thanks to our benefactor Jerry Buff, UWM Special Collections has all nine issues of The Imprint and will likely feature more gems from their pages in future posts.

More Typography Tuesday posts

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

Type for Books and Advertising by the noted authority on typography Eugene M. Ettenberg (1903-1992), and published in 1947 by the New York science and technology publisher D. Van Nostrand Company, was intended as a comprehensive guide for anyone working with or interested in type and the printed word.

“Type for books and advertising is intended for you, who having been drawn to type – and having felt its subtle attractions, want to know more – more of its history, designers, basic rules, simple arithmetic and endless lore.”

This book goes over the tools of the trade and how to identify typefaces. There is a history of typography highlighting important dates and events from the 15th through the 19th centuries. The section on 20th-century typography feature biographies of some of the master type designers of the day, including Milwaukee’s own Morris Fuller Benton, the most prolific of all 20th-century type designers.

In the chapter “20 Type Men Speak,” there is “a wealth of opinion born of the travails and joys of working with type.” One can read in the designers’ own words the thought process behind their work, including Warren Chappell, Richard Ellis, and Paul Rand. Interestingly, among the “20 Type Men” is one woman, the exceptional Helen Gentry, noted for the design work she did for several publishing firms, including Simon and Schuster and the classic 1953 Harper & Brothers edition of the Little House series, as well as for co-founding the notable children's book publisher Holiday House.

Eugene M. Ettenberg was a prolific author of works on typography and printing, and was editor of the influential industry annual Advertising and Publishing Production Yearbook from 1934-37. His Type for Books and Advertising remained the standard industry reference book for decades after its publication.

View more Typography Tuesday posts

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

We are huge fans of The Typophiles and thanks to our benefactor Jerry Buff we are acquiring quite a collection of their publications. Today we feature the seventh in the series of Typophile Chap Books, Roman Numerals, Typographic Leaves and Pointing Hands: Some Notes on Their Origin, History, and Contemporary Use by Paul McPharlin. It was published in 1942 in a limited edition of 395 copies for contributors and subscribers. It was designed by Fred Anthoensen, set in Linotype Janson, and printed at the Southworth-Anthoensen Press in Portland, Maine.

In his introduction Paul A. Bennett describes that this book was begun back in 1937 after they finished “Ampersanding”. The call went out that The Typophiles were researching Roman numerals and with the help of, among others, Lawrence C. Wroth, Arthur A. Houghton, Jr., Dr. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt and Professor E. K. Rand, a significant amount of notes were collected. The collected research was sent to Paul McPharlin who began to do further research and editing. McPharlin saw within the Roman inscriptions interesting leaf imagery. Then he began noting the typographic leaves in early printed books where he also saw pointing hands, or manicules: “One thing leading to another, he uncovered points which seemed not to have been considered at all before.”

As book historians we are familiar with this process of one thing leading to another. In a similar vein, it was a pleasant surprise to find out that Paul McPharlin was another typographer who, like W. A. Dwiggins, enjoyed marionettes. We will feature more of McPharlin’s marionette work in the future. For now here is an image from Puppet Hands and Their Making with a Note on Feet: Theorem and Woodcuts, written and illustrated by Paul McPharlin.

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

This pamphlet, Caledonia, A New Printing Type Designed for Mergenthaler Linotype Company by W.A. Dwiggins was published in 1939 by the Mergenthaler Linotype Company in Brooklyn, New York. W.A. Dwiggins (WAD) writes about the process of creating Caledonia, and under the pseudonym Hermann Püterschein he also writes about himself.

WAD condenses his process into a few paragraphs and figures, but it must have taken a significant amount of time at the drawing table to move the Scotch Modern face away from the “woodenness” of the 19th-century design and develop a “liveliness of action.”

That quality is in the curves - the way they get away from the straight stems with a calligraphic flick, and in the nervous angle on the under side of the arches as they descend to the right. (fig.5) The finishing strokes at the bottoms of the letters, cut straight across without “brackets,” making sharp angles with the upright stems, add “snap” to many of the old “modern face” designs - and why not to Caledonia?

He christened this typeface Caledonia because he was inspired by the work of early Scotch typefounders like Alexander Wilson.

Writing as his alter ego Hermann Püterschein, WAD discusses his approach to modern design:

Any relatively competent design looks important if you set it up in mediocre surroundings. The design of books in the United States has never been forceful. Consequently this artist’s designs, which have a kind of original force, are conspicuous...

Left to himself he would have gone on as he started: a student of historical design, conservative, timid. My ideas opened up a prospect. He is clever at adapting.

He creates an illusion of machines. But his machines are a masquerade, there are men inside them.

See more posts with W. A. Dwiggins

See more Typography Tuesday posts

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

This week we present a selection of pages from The Typefoundry in Silhouette: How Printing Type is Developed at Klingspor Bros. in Offenbach on the River Main by the legendary German type designer Rudolf Koch. Published in 1982, this is the ninth publication from Andrew Hoyem’s Arion Press, a portfolio of 25 silhouettes reproduced from the first edition published by the Klingspor Type Foundry as Die Schriftgiesserei im Schattenbild in 1918.

Silhouettes cut from black paper had been popular in Victorian times, and one would typically encounter portraits in profile. Rudolf Koch (1876-1934), arguably among the greatest calligraphers and type designers of the twentieth century, took the art form of silhouettes to a new level. By using a knife rather than scissors to create the imagery, Koch illustrated the process of manufacturing type at the Klingspor Bros. Type Foundry, carefully depicting the people and machines he knew well. This gave the images the graphic quality of woodcuts, which Koch is also well known for making.

In the original, the verses beneath each illustration were set in a Fraktur font named Kochschrift, the first design Koch developed for Klingspor. This edition is set in Jessenschrift, a type designed by Koch between 1924 and 1930 that reflects a period when Gothic types were beginning to take on roman characteristics.

The translation of Koch’s German text by Alexander Nesbitt is the first in English. The publication, another gift from our friend and benefactor Jerry Buff, was printed in an edition of 500 copies from hand-set Jessenschrift printed in red and photo-engravings printed in black on heavy-weight British mouldmade cotton paper. The sheets are unbound and are enclosed in a portfolio of red cloth imported from Germany. Our copy is signed by Andrew Hoyem.

View other Typography Tuesday posts.

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

Published in 1928 by Harper and Brothers, Printing of To-Day: An Illustrated Survey of Post-War Typography in Europe and the United States contains several specimens indicative of the general trend in design for the printed book after WWI. The book has three sections: “Printing in England,” “Printing in the United States,” and “Continental Printing”.

Today we are featuring specimens from the section “Continental Printing,” by Julius Rodenberg. The variation of type in continental Europe during this time is reflective of the cultural, geographic, and political changes going on after WWI. Fraktur, Schwabacher, and Gothic types were still extensively used in Germany and much of the work was still composed by hand rather than by machines like the Linotype. New countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia were looking forward to their own national identities while still honoring their cultural history. Book production in Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, and Holland were influenced by English types, and most notably the work of the Kelmscott Press. French design was distinctive and the French aesthetic of relating illustration to typography was widely influential. In Russia, at this time, books served as a constituent part of political and economic publicity. The typography and book design was meant to attract attention.

[O]ne characteristic common to all European countries, [is] the ambition on the part of each nation to develop an independent book-style of its own, which is made evident by the production of a national type. This national type is to do justice to the peculiarities of the language. The chief feature of Continental printing is avoidance of uniformity: its unity lies in a uniform will and purpose, the results of which, however, are dissimilar.

Clicking on the images will reveal the name of the type used in each specimen and the city in which they were published.

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

Victor Hammer (1882-1965) was born on September 9th, but we are celebrating a little early because #TypographyTuesday is the perfect day to reflect on his life and work. Hammer explored a variety of arts including painting, drawing, etching, and sculpture. His exploration into print making turned into an interest in typography and led him to design and produce his own type. His uncial type designs came about partly because of his interest in the way type forms could relate to language: “[W]hile he accepted the Roman letters of our time as ideal for the Latin language, he rejected it for other languages such as French, German, and English.”

Hammer explored all aspects of printing including constructing his own hand press and the fine art of punchcutting. His first attempt at punchcutting was his own Pindar uncial. He put all his detailed knowledge, practice, and perfectionism together to produce the distinguished books that came out of his various presses: Stamperia del Santuccio, Wells College Press, Hammer Press, and Anvil Press.

These images are from The Printing Salesman’s Herald: Book 14, published by Champion Papers, Inc., of Hamilton, Ohio in 1965. This edition features the editorial, Victor Hammer: Artist and Master of the Printing Art by R. Hunter Middleton. The photographs are by Van Deren Coke. Our copy was donated by our friend and benefactor Jerry Buff, and was originally from the collection of the typographers and letterpress printers Lili and Erich Wronker of the Ron Press.

Check out our Victor Hammer post from earlier this year.