EndGrain » Books

The Art of Wood Type

Bethany Heck — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:39:55 +0000

In some ways, The Art of Wood Type is this generation’s American Wood Type. The book starts off with some scattered history on wood type and features some artists who use letterpress blocks to print and as art in and of themselves. The back half of the book is dedicated to photos of wood type alphabets and vector recreations of the prints. The book features some very rare ornamental typefaces, it is a treat to see them in print.

New Vintage Type

Bethany Heck — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:30:41 +0000

While not explicitly a letterpress book, New Vintage Type has loads of excellent examples of the current design applications of wood type. The book is divided into sections, one for victorian ornamental type, one for the meaty wood types, “modern” art deco styles, and so on. I like that the book has a fair amount of information about each piece instead of just slapping huge images on the pages. The typefaces used are noted and in some cases the vintage pieces the designers used as inspiration are depicted.

American Wood Type

Bethany Heck — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:25:20 +0000

Rob Roy Kelly’s American Wood Type remains the bible for wood type despite being published decades ago. Mr. Kelly compiled a detailed history of different wood type foundries, faces and trends, marking yearly trends and giving specimens of hundreds of typefaces. The back of the book has dozens of full page specimen sheets of a wide variety of alphabets.

Consider yourself lucky if you can get your hands on a copy. The website the University of Texas has launched to document his collection eases the sting of the scarcity of the book, though I would encourage anyone who has the patience and the funds to find a copy, or to try the local library.

The Handy Book of Artistic Printing

Bethany Heck — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:24:09 +0000

When I purchased this book, all I was expecting was some nice eye candy and a little bit of history. Man, was I surprised when I finally got my hands on it. This book has the eye candy, of course, but the writing and design of the book itself are just as fantastic. The amount of research that must have gone into this book is mind boggling, and it really takes the book to a whole new level. Here is the Publisher’s Description:

“During the late nineteenth century, letterpress printers, engravers, and lithographers boldly challenged the rational sobriety of traditional design by introducing intricate borders, corner embellishments, quirky typefaces, and exotic imagery. The style was known as ‘artistic’ and was quickly taken up by letterpress printers as the design idiom of choice for advertisements, packaging, and all of the other ephemera occasioned by the rapid expansion of America’s economy. For a while, this commercial style represented the best in popular taste.

But just as quickly as this exuberant style was embraced, it fell abruptly out of favor. By century’s end, the ornate bits of artistic printing were tossed into the gutter, and the style itself relegated to the dustbin of history. The rise and fall of this highly embellished idiom, which culminated in its denouncement as aesthetically and morally suspect ‘a freak of fancy’ are traced in this, the first comprehensive study devoted to the history of American artistic printing. Authors Douglas Clouse and Angela Voulangas explore the style’s origins in the British Aesthetic Movement and analyze its distinctive features: idiosyncratic color harmonies, eclectic choice of type and ornament, compartmentalized compositional strategies. They also present a landmark portfolio of letterpress printing samples, drawn from some of the most important public and private print archives. More than 150 examples of period ephemera, printers’ own tour de force promotional pieces, and specimens of type and ornament are reproduced, many for the very first time since their initial circulation more than a century ago.

The Handy Book of Artistic Printing celebrates a previously berated and today largely forgotten episode of design history one of increasing interest in light of the recent embrace of ornament by some leading contemporary designers. This book will be of value to graphic designers, but also to fine artists, visual merchandisers, and collectors of ephemera everywhere.”