Category: Type

New Wood Type for Letterpress

Stencil from Virgin Wood TypeThis past fall, Bill Jones bought the original patterns for around 100 typefaces from the now defunct American Wood Type Manufacturing Company as well as a large pantograph for cutting wood type. He’s set up shop in his garage and has started producing “entire fonts, alphabets for collectors, sorts and fill-in characters to complete a font, and ornaments.” He’s now offering 5 fonts on his website, Virgin Wood Type. Jones writes about making one of the fonts, Rugged, here. A while back, I wrote a post about another guy making wood type with a pantograph — that post has links to pictures of cutting the type as well as a youtube video.

Just My Type

Just my Type by Simon GarfieldIn a comment to a recent post I made, my friend Kate says check out the book Just My Type: A Book About Fonts. I looked it up, and was amused by the product description on Amazon:

What’s your type? Suddenly everyone’s obsessed with fonts. Whether you’re enraged by Ikea’s Verdanagate, want to know what the Beach Boys have in common with easy Jet or why it’s okay to like Comic Sans, “Just My Type” will have the answer. Learn why using upper case got a New Zealand health worker sacked. Refer to Prince in the Tafkap years as a Dingbat (that works on many levels). Spot where movies get their time periods wrong and don’t be duped by fake posters on eBay. Simon Garfield meets the people behind the typefaces and along the way learns why some fonts — like men — are from Mars and some are from Venus. From type on the high street and album covers, to the print in our homes and offices, Garfield is the font of all types of knowledge.

Retrofonts

Retrofonts by Gregor StawinskiGregor Stawinski’s book Retrofonts is a chronicle of more than 360 fonts designs from last 150 years, with an accompanying CD containing 222 copyright-free fonts. He’s categorized the fonts into nine chronological sections, ranging from “Art Nouveau and Japonism” to “Postmodern and Punk.” It was reviewed in the NY Times Book Review the other day. The reviewer, Steven Heller, says “This is not the first book to collect passé typefaces. Nor is it the first to uncritically celebrate the good, the bad and the ugly. But it is one of the most attractive and inclusive works of its kind, revealing how, as the preface states, ‘fonts encode the zeitgeist’.” You can see samples of the fonts in the book here.