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Lead in my veins
February 27, 2008
Yesterday morning, for about three hours, I was distributing type. Yep! Hand-set type.
I bought four fonts of handset type last week, and they arrived yesterday by UPS. It’s lead, tin and antimony mixed together, then injection-molded into matrices to make little tiny individual letters of a type font. I haven’t bought metal type in a long time, but I needed it this week, so I got on the phone and called
MacKenzie & Harris in San Francisco, one of a handful of type foundries left on the planet. I talked to a nice young man named Kenny, telling him I needed two each of Centaur 10 point lower case and caps. It totaled about $100 including shipping.
Metal type is cast from lead, and is still available from a small number of foundries in the world.
The new type went into a nice California Job Case that did not already have a resident font. It is now part of the collection of the
Shakespeare Press Museum, a treasure on the campus of Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. This is a student-run working print shop, fashioned after the small shops that dotted American towns in the late 19th century. The museum has more than a dozen hand-operated printing presses, all in working condition, and a fabulous collection of hand-set type. The smallest font is 4 point Copperplate on a 6 point body. I have to wear a magnifier over my glasses just to see the letters I have in my hand when I use that stuff! The largest is 18-inch-tall wood type made of maple from northern Michigan.
The reason I was in the museum is that I am the Museum’s new faculty advisor, and I was student curator back in 1971. This stuff runs in my blood. For the last two weeks of the quarter I require my students of Advanced Typography to learn how to set type and print using letterpress equipment. At the end of these two weeks, the students will know the true meaning of the word
leading. And, they often tell me – later – that it was the best experience they had while a student in our four-year program in Graphic Communication. Imagine that!
The students set type for, and print a small fold-over card. They learn how to compose type, how to lock it up in a chase, and then they
learn how to put it back when they are finished. The result is a lovely hand-printed card of which they are justifiably* proud. And, I stand back and admire their work, all the while watching them learn about 21st century technologies while using 15th century technology. The students learn that type is more than just a menu selection, that spacing is as critical as the letters themselves, and that really nice letterpress printing does not punch-through the back of the paper (a trend among the “trendy” who use letterpress to de-boss paper while printing on it).
It’s a great experience for the students, and it’s a great experience for me to keep the tradition alive.
*pun intended
Posted by Brian Lawler on February 27, 2008 | Comments (0)
