It is evening! As daylight fades tired hands reluctantly lay by the work not yet done. The old mill with four grey walls rearing high above mossy rocks; its rough-hewed beams that read a builder’s day of long ago, stands grim and silent in the evening air. From its outswung casements’ grated squares we see, far [...]
Dear Mr. Kent:
I know little or nothing about machines, and therefore take the greatest pleasure in giving you my advice; for my experience is, that the less a person knows, the more free he is in giving his opinion. (Indeed, I find that in theology entire ignorance of the subject is the best qualification for strongly expressing one’s views; [...]
Daniel Berkeley Updike, of the Merrymount Press, Boston, died in December, 1941. Little notice was taken in this country of his death, owing to the state of war and to the fact that our typographical journals had in consequence ceased publication. This omission certainly did not mean that there was any falling off in our [...]
Jan van Krimpen, A letter to Philip Hofer on certain problems connected with the mechanical cutting of punches. A facsimile reproduction with an introduction and commentary by John Dreyfus (Studies in the history of calligraphy and printing No. 4). Cambridge (Mass.), Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Harvard College Library/Boston, David R. Godine, 1972, 8°, 102 pp., [...]
Two years ago The Monotype Corporation paid tribute to Dr. Giovanni Mardersteig on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday by issuing a limited edition of a publication devoted to his typographic work with ‛Monotype’ faces. In view of the great interest shown in this publication, we are here printing an adaptation of the introductory essay by John [...]
Swash may suggest to today’s younger designer the modern application of numerous curliques and exaggerated strokes to Bookman and numerous other faces—even to Helvetica—but the typographer with a background in metal types is more likely to think of Caslon and Garamond, with their traditional sets of graceful swash letters.
What we seldom realize is that there are [...]
Probably you never read anything on this subject before. Yet it is a matter of which every advertiser and printer should know.
The swash letter, now so popular in the finer kind of typography, is no new trick of the type founder. It has simply been taken from its hiding place in the occasional privately printed handmade [...]
Octavius A. Dearing, who developed the “California” typecase, was born in East Buxton, York County, Maine, on September 28, 1840. On August 30, 1862, he enlisted in Company E, First Regiment of Maine Cavalry Volunteers, for service in the Civil War. On his enlistment papers he described himself as a “printer.” He developed varicose veins [...]
The issue of the Printer and Bookmaker for December 1899 contains an interesting article entitled “The Lay of the Case.”¹ The author writes: “The printers’ type-case bears evidence that the original cases of the early typographers were arranged with the boxes in alphabetical order, and as this would be the natural method of a man familiar [...]
I used to spend occasional evenings at the Boston Public Library, reading, partly for the pleasure of the contents, patly for the exhilaration of the printing, the books which William Morris had printed at the Kelmscott Press. This was only five or six years after the close of that establishment, and those who have [...]