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.