Category: Type

One of the books I most admired at the Pyramid Atlantic book fair earlier this month was a book from Sherwin Beach Press — Searching For Morris Fuller Benton. Benton is a type designer, best known for Franklin Gothic.

Benton is the most prolific type designer of the hot metal era, but unlike Frederic Goudy, Bruce Rogers, or William Dwiggins–whose ideas about type design are well documented–Benton wrote nothing about his own work, nor was it the subject of analysis by others. Juliet Shen has made a meticulous study of his work, including a new enumeration of designs appropriately attributed to him.

I’m working on another season-themed miniature book to go with Summer in Vermont and Winter’s Song. This one is for autumn and includes a haiku that lists the names of several apple varieties. I showed a model of the book to my friend Cathy and she immediately pulled out a book called Apples I Have Eaten (seen above).

Of the thousands of known apple varieties, only about twenty can be found in grocery stores. Apples I Have Eaten is a tribute to a bushel of the harder-to-find heirloom apple cultivars—including the Goldrush, Burgundy, Prairie Spy, Hidden Rose…. Each apple was locally sourced, lovingly photographed, and then happily eaten by artist and author.

I’m hand-setting the type for this new book, as I did with Summer in Vermont. When I set that earlier book, I noticed I hadn’t used all the letters of the alphabet, and only one or two ligatures. The apple variety haiku in the new autumn book is a chance to use words with ligatures or seldom used letters, like x or z. So Cathy & I went through Gerken’s book and then this list of apple varieties and came up with Foxwhelp and Biffin. So my haiku is

Tolman Sweet, Rubinette,
Biffin, Foxwhelp.
Apple a day.

Still curious, I went through the haiku I’m planning to use for my autumn book, and I’m using all the ligatures — fi, fl, ffi, ffl and ff. Yeah!

When I was in Northern California earlier this month for the BABA Book Jam, I heard a talk by poet and typographer Robert Bringhurst at the Commonwealth Club. I also got to see a copy of his book What Is Reading For? (courtesy of Alyson Kuhn), a lovely letterpress chapbook documenting a talk Bringhurst gave on the links between reading’s future and past. I’ve ordered a copy for myself and there’s a post by Steven Heller on the book here.

Recently I printed these ampersand coasters. Unfortunately for me, the paper on some of the coasters cracked a wee bit as I was printing them. So I’m selling them for 25% off. They come as a set of 8 — two of each color.

When I first started making books, I endeavored to make 26 different alphabet books. I gave up after a dozen or so (you can see one of them here). I’ve continued to collect them, if not make my own, and recently happened upon a print and fold alphabet, shown below and mentioned on How about orange. And a trove of alphabet books on Brain Pickings including a few I own, such as Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies.

This is from xkcd. While he usually writes about technology and science, here’s another one about typography.