Scott Polzen’s handcut wood type based on Carol Twombly’s Chaparral Bold

On the wall of my office, I have several large pieces of faux wood type that I made by tracing letters in my favorite font-face onto some foam core, cutting out the letters, mounting them to frames I made and then painting the whole assemblage. Occassionally I think idly about trying to make some type of out of real wood.
So it was fun to find out about Scott Polzen, who has made wood type from scratch. So far he’s made 3-1/2 complete sets, each using a progressively more sophisticated method for carving the letters. He constructed the first set by carving 1/4″ high letters and then mounting them to blocks of wood. In the last set, he used a pantograph, an instrument that allows one to scale and copy diagrams, or in this case, letters, and was able to create a single type-high block for each letter.
You can see the various typefaces Scott has made on his website, as well as an explanation of how he made each set. He also has a video on YouTube showing him cut out one of the letters.

Wow! Did I ever hit the jackpot! So many great poems were submitted to my giveaway celebrating National Poetry Month. Lots of poets and verse I hadn’t read — good thing I didn’t make the criteria “my favorite” and instead selected a name out of a hat! As one entrant emailed me “selecting a favorite poem is akin to naming one’s favorite child! It simply can’t be done.”

And the winner of my broadside is Lauren, at one {crafty} writer, who submitted Mark Strand’s Coming to This.

Thanks again to everyone! Here’s a poem I would have submitted, one I never tire of:

Numbers
Mary Cornish

I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.

I like the domesticity of addition —
add two cups of milk and stir —
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.

And multiplication’s school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.

Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else’s
garden now.

There’s an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.

And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.

Three boys beyond their mothers’ call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn’t anywhere you look.

Last summer, Drew Matott of the People’s Republic of Paper gave a class in 17th century paper making at the San Francisco Center for the Book. My friend Pam met Drew while he was in SF, and later met him at Columbia College in Chicago to learn to make paper herself. She brought back with her a huge pile of the most beautiful paper — and many of us have been watching excitedly as Pam finishes the paper and puts it to use in a book she’s writing. While in Chicago, she got involved with the Combat Paper Project — a group of Iraq war veterans who have cut up their uniforms, turned them into pulp and paper, and then that paper into books of poetry, broadsides and works of art. Pam has some of the paper they’ve made — with visible bits of uniform — that is quite moving to see. Even more moving is this short documentary of the project, showing the veterans making paper and using the act of making art to transform their war experiences.

As part of The Medieval Season series from the BBC, in the installment “The Machine That Made Us,” Stephen Fry travels to France and Germany on the trail of Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press. The printing press was the world’s first mass-production machine, and Fry shows how it was at the forefront of a cultural revolution that transformed the west. Along the way Fry learns to make paper, cast type, and, best of all, reconstructs a working replica of Gutenburg’s first press. (There are no extant pictures or plans for that first press, so there’s a bit of historical detective work to figure out how the press might have been configured.) It’s a wonderful documentary, and you can watch it on Youtube as 6 10-minute videos.

To celebrate National Poetry Month, I’m giving away one of my one-of-a-kind Pattern Forms broadsides. That’s a detail picture of the broadside to the left. It’s a cut paper collage with a letterpress printed original haiku beneath it. The collage is 3-1/2″ x 3-1/2″, on 6″ x 9″ paper, and sits in a hand-debossed (recessed) panel. The type is handset in Baskerville; the paper is Somerset. You can see the entire broadside here.
To win, post your favorite poem in a comment below or email it to me by April 29th. The winner will be announced on May 1st. Be sure to leave an email address where I can reach you. The winner will be selected at random from the submitted poems.

Which font is this one here? Try your luck with this multiple choice Font Game. [The answer to the left is “Hoefler Text.”]

For many years, Jack Stauffacher, a well-known letterpress printer and book-designer at Greenwood Press in San Francisco, has been making broadsides and prints using his small collection of assorted pieces of large wood type. Several prints he did with Dennis Letbetter for an edition in 2006 have recently been on display at San Francisco Center for the Book. In the text for the exhibit there’s a quote by Stauffacher that sums up perfectly how I feel about creating my own wood type collage prints.

“Taking these shapes, these letters, they are somehow no longer letters in the formal sense, they become more of a shape, an abstraction, and I have used them [within the page size] allotted to the portfolios in a variety of arrangements, different colors, different connections with the text and the photographs. When you work this closely on the press, you don’t have it all figured out, you do the whole thing mostly right there in the process.”

More on Stauffacher and his wood type work are here. You can see all the prints in the Vico Duodecimo portfolio, one of which is pictured above, here.