Rhiannon sent me link to a post of 30 Alphabet Recreations — alphabets made of every day objects, like food or clips made to hang frames on the wall. Above is the one I liked best. The woman who made it says
Building up the letters also reminded me very much of typesetting, as every type made of colored books had to be blocked with white books, just as it is done in letterpress, where large areas of white space are created by wooden blocks called furniture.
See more details here.
 Rhiannon sent me a link to The Alphabetography Project: A Study Of Letters, a blog where the authors “eat Alpha-Bits cereal, drink alphabet soup and watch Sesame Street for the letter of the day.” I quite enjoyed looking through their photos of found letters — the one to the right is for a radio station in NYC. Check out the blog here.
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Below are 2 letters from Rachel Young’s Alphabet, found using Google maps. You can see all of them here.
In my letterpress classes I am constantly reminding students to use a ruler or pica pole to measure things — Is the type straight on the page? Is it really centered? How much furniture do they need for the lockup? Some resist (although everyone comes around by the end of the day), but others start immediately to reminisce about using a type gauge, like the Haberule ones on the left.
I looked up the Haberule the other day, to see if perhaps I could find one to show students. I immediately found the Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies, full of tools that were useful not-so-long-ago, but have been mostly supplanted by computers. Look here for info on the Haberule (be sure to look at the comments, which explain how it works).
These lovely specimens are from the Mano/Dean Wood Type collection at the a Mano Press in Hayward, California. There’s a flickr set chocked full of photos — they made me very happy to scroll through them!
The Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers Wisconsin is celebrating their 10th anniversary this year. The museum is in an old factory, and they’ve decorated it with large type and the awning is a giant drawer pull, like the ones on type cases. Nick Sherman has a great pool of photos on Flickr. And there’s a nice interview by Steven Heller about the museum and the history of wood type here (and a few more photos, including a gorgeous hand-cut wooden Q).
