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).
 These “t towels” are made by Susan Fitzgerald of spin spin out of Melbourne, Australia. They feature screen prints of her hand-drawn rendering of various letter Ts, including Garamond, Hoefler, Kevlar, Mrs Eaves and Caslon. She also makes goofy (and cute) alphabet elephants from her hand-printed fabric.
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At the Codex book fair last February, Leonard Seastone had an ABC print that particularly interested me. I asked him if I could reproduce it for the upcoming Ampersand and in addition to saying “yes” he also sent me a wonderful email with some background on the broadside:
I have long admired some of Hermann Zapf’s broadsides with homage quotes to type design….So several years ago when Graham Moss, of the Incline Press, and I were fondly talking of the early to middle 20th century, German type designs Graham informed me of his intention to publish a book about Emil Rudolf Weiss (Weiß). He requested I design and print a broadside using any type designed by Weiss that would then be tipped into his publication. I readily agreed thinking to use my collection of Weiss Initials in several point sizes. I also envisioned a hand-set broadside in the style of that early gift to me. Eventually I focused on a display of Weiss Initials II. Using Weiss Italic for the text was selected almost without thought. But what should the text be?
My own written thoughts about type are few and largely unpublished. My written text on type sometimes seems to stylistically read like an attempt to channel Thomas Mann. But I do feel that type and books can approach the sublime and besides Graham is a great encourager and thought my words were quite appropriate….
At SFCB, I teach primarily beginning letterpress. Students have so much new stuff to learn — locking up a chase, using a pica pole, setting metal type, where everything is in the studio — that there’s no time to do anything fancy with the quotes they print. Only one font face at a time, maybe an in-line dingbat. But when I get to teach an advanced class, as I did this past Sunday, the students have enough experience to play around more with type. Nicole brought several haiku from a contest in honor of the documentary Helvetica and set and printed the one shown above. Below is the one she wanted to do, but unfortunately we don’t have Helvetica in metal at SFCB! (You can see all the haiku here.)
Helevetica sits,
watching you try the new fonts.
It knows you’ll be back.
These little wooden birds were carved by Japanese Americans during their internment in camps during World War II. The bird’s tiny legs are crafted from the surplus snipped off the wire mesh screens over barrack windows. In 2002, Delphine Hirasuna discovered a small wooden bird in a box of her mother’s, and she wondered what “other objects made in the camps lay tossed aside and forgotten, never shown to anyone because they might generate questions too painful to answer.” She’s collected an array of objects, from these birds to teapots carved from slabs of slate, umbrellas fashioned from cigarette paper and chopsticks, paintings on shells and rocks, and weavings of onion skin, and for the past few years, there has been a traveling exhibit of her finds. She’s also written a book: The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942-1946. (Click on this link to see spreads of the book, showing some of the crafts.)
What’s this have to do with bookmaking you ask? I discovered Hirasuna’s book when reading this blog post where she discusses coming up with the title and cover jacket design for her book (which she says “proved as hard as developing the content”). It’s an interesting read.
And by the way, she also explains that gaman means “bearing the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” There’s an NPR podcast about the exhibition here and an interview with Hirasuna here.
The East End Arts Club has an online exhibit of a diverse range of interpretations of the alphabet from an appreciation of pure typographic form to pangrams and visual dictionaries. You can see all the prints here (although they don’t reveal why the title of the show is “Said Why Eggs”). The one to the left is “East End Letters” by Phil Sheffield.