Type – Page 21 – Green Chair Press Blog

Weiss Italic

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My own written thoughts about type are few and largely unpublished.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….
The Incline Press Book on E.R.Weiss is due out this Autumn. This broadside…will be included. … I printed a few extra, all on Zerkal paper, as it was not an easy piece to set and compose by hand. I wanted a few that might exist free of the book format… the book format, which I do love, but which I realize remains closed for 99 percent of its life. Graham agreed to my printing extra and offering them outside the book. They are available for $35 + shipping.

Leonard Seastone print

Leonard Seastone print, detail

Said Why Eggs: 26 Alphabets by 26 Artists

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.

Alphabet Soup

Ryan Beshara’s Modern Pop shop recently listed this nifty alphabet poster called “Alphabet Soup.” She also has prints of numbers and letters.

Type Tea Towels

Before desktop computers became prevalent, artwork was prepared by hand with 2 ways to do lettering — hand-written or transfered from pre-printed sheets (usually by rubbing the letters off the sheet onto the artwork). The generic name for these sheets is “letraset,” although it’s also the name of a company in England that still makes the sheets. There were other companies, like Mecanorma, that also made dry-transfer lettering (see these photos of vintage lettreset sheets on Flickr.)
Karin Röling, who runs stiksel and is a graphic designer in the Netherlands, makes tea towels with Mecanorma sheets screen printed on them, as well as other type-infused things like pillows and dolls.

Read Between the Leading

Aaron Heth and Matt McInerney are design students at the Savannah College of Art & Design. They produce three or four episodes a month on their audio journal, Read Between the Leading. Recently they had a conversation with Nick Sherman of MyFonts…

I like to write small…

One of the pieces my friend Sharon & I enjoyed and talked about most at the Friends of Calligraphy exhibition the other day was “The Rules of Courtly Love” by Linnea Lundquist (The rules are from the 12th century, by Andreas Capellanus — see them here). The writing is very tiny — the whole thing fits in a 10-inch frame — and it’s ingeniously arranged in what she calls a “labyrinth” pattern. It’s quite beautiful.
When I got home, I tried to find more images of Lundquist’s work (the photo above is from Cari Ferraro’s blog). I didn’t. But I discovered that I’ve met her several times at PCBA book fairs, where she and her husband, Ward Durham, sell pens and sealing wax (through their company Atelier Gargoyle).