Good afternoon. I would like to start with a bit of history since the invention of printing.
Woodblocks have been used to add either illustrations, drop caps or decorations to books.
This is a French initial that was cut in route around 1464, and this kind of woodcuts would appear fairly regular in books and.
This is another one that is a little bit later, 1477 rattled the German wood engraver.
And all this, all these woodcuts would just be done manually.
And every one was slightly different type of type found.
It didn't create anything yet in those days. So it was all based on these kind of initials.
But patterns that were cutting would have also been used by top farmers to cast metal tight in larger sizes.
This is metal type, but there was, first of all, a pattern being cut and then led would be poured in.
And this here is from 1582.
It's by Mr. Sartorius.
So you can still see that it was originally a woodcuts they made a dye of it and then a cast led in it, and that could be multiplied several times.
It can be found in the grounds of the man as well.
This is also this is to be found in the plant in museum in Antwerp.
This was this was cut and cast by Mr. from the care around 1565.
So this is not a good example of first of all, cutting it is about making a matrix of it and then pouring metal in it.
In 1820, William Kessel on the fourth introduced a novel way of casting larger sizes of type two.
Metal plates were riveted together in one metal plate.
The character was cut out and the small rich would be fixed around that character.
Then they could pour the metal in and let it set.
And these cast characters would be done fixed to a block of food and to bring it to the type height.
A few years later, in 1827, Darius Wells from New York invented the lateral rotor.
And combined with the bond graph that George Leavenworth added in 1834, it became the means to mass produce one type.
So here we see an image and a new type workshop.
The lady on the right is finishing off the rooftop with Shellac.
That gives a protective layer to the roots and that holds the ink better.
The gentleman on the left, he is working the rotor dependent NAF rotor.
So he's got a pattern and with a pin he follows the pattern.
And on the other side, you've got a rotor bit that cuts the way.
Edwin Allan Well, without having any knowledge of the machine that developed and lever was built, reinvented the combined Pendergraft round in 1836.
And I've got a photo here of a Swiss built Rotor Pendergraft from 1899.
And this you can see on the right, you've got the pattern block with the pin that follows the that follows the pattern.
And on the left you see the router bit ready to cut away in the boot.
And this method has been in use for many decades.
A few years later, around 1880, Mr. Hamilton from Wisconsin in the United States tried his luck as well, but he tried to work with vinegar.
So he tried to compete with all the manufacturers of woodchuck,
and he cut his characters in vinegar, and that would be glued or fixed to wooden blocks.
He could reduce his price drastically, and he became the biggest manufacturer of wood type in the United States.
Other people also try. This is an image of this gives an idea of the size of the Hamilton motor factory in Wisconsin.
Today, the company still exists. It is the Hamilton type museum, but they still produce time.
They still hold all the patents and all the machines, and they still sell type as well.
So it's not this plant anymore.
The plant has sadly been pulled down. A few years ago, the last bit of it, the chimney was blown up and now they're in a new modern building.
A lot of people try to look as well. So there was a mr. Cisco.
He patented in 1887 a machine to diced and would type so he would have metal dye and he would put the root of a block of root under the dye.
And with high pressure, he would actually cut into the root and the outer parts were removed.
This is one of his patents. Here's another one here.
You can clearly see in the five different figures, you've got a block and you cut into it with the metal dye and then you remove the bars.
The figure four gives actually the metal dye. And if this was not enough,
manufacturers also experimented with so-called animal type A procedure whereby a
layer of celluloid was either pressed or fixed with dovetails to a block of fruit.
So this is an example of animal type and the bottom one is just glued to the woodblock
and the top one has got a dovetail construction and that helps the celluloid in place.
The advantage of a celluloid block was that it would take the ink very well.
It would damage less quick, then the wood type would do.
On this side of the ocean. European manufacturers like in Paris, Miller Richard in Edinburgh, Adlington in London,
will produce to Moutai for the capital and foundry vertov in Berlin and the Bolsheviks in Frankfurt to mine produce large quantities of type.
This is the title page of A Foundry Foundation of Old Boudoir by See.
And they did metal type nouveau type courses, but they also had a department who would type and type specimens,
very nice because it had all these little slips stuck into it.
In the period between 1825 and 1850, American manufacturers copied European styles,
but soon started developing their own style and not only supplied the home market, but also exported to Europe and South America.
Manufacturing who type the traditional way.
We've seen a few images of how it was done with the photographs, but before that, pentagram for others was created.
People would cut that by hand. Like I mentioned at the beginning, this is a detail of a fantastic, full of time.
The characters resemble a wall of bricks and it has got a very fine three dimensional line to it.
So it's like a3d brick wall typeface.
This is probably 1890, 1880, 80, 1890 cut in France.
All some of the characters had been cut twice.
Obviously, somebody started cutting. It made a mistake to look over and cut again.
This is some Italian wood type, extremely ornate, beautifully carved.
So with the arrival of those machines and more precise printing presses, the production of both type really took off.
Different kinds of foods have been and are still used for the production of food type boxwood.
For instance, butchers, pear, cherry, linden, acorn and steamed beech are the most common ones,
and Greenwalt is preferred to obtain this tree trunks are cut into discs slightly higher than the Typekit height.
These flaps are of root are then stored for up to five years to dry out completely before they can even be treated.
Here is a picture from the 1960s. This is in the Hamilton Wood type company.
They had these warehouses full of racks on wheels and somebody would stick them all neatly, turn them regularly around so they would dry evenly.
Once the slips were dry enough, they would be sent down and treated with brimstone.
And a couple of layers of shellac before they would go to the department where
they would cut the bad parts in the wood and blemishes were being removed.
And then when that was all done, they would go to the guy.
This was measuring the correct height. The gentleman uses.
A machine that was built by a vendor cook and he checks to type height.
The block has to be correct height in order to be printed.
The operator of the machine uses Petrus to create individual characters.
These patterns were often cut out of thin plywood and affixed to a thicker wooden base.
But other materials, such as cardboard and sheet brass, were equally used to create the raised batteries.
This is one of the potatoes from Stevenson and Blake. They were ten millimetres thick and about a hundred millimetres high and that would be used.
That would be fixed on the Pendergast machine, carefully followed round around first with a course rotor bit.
And then final and final and fighter. There was a company in York.
The most important company in the UK was the little from York.
They functioned until the 1970s and they made a patent in three millimetres thick metal and these were slightly larger to the 35 millimetres height.
Here. You can see again a picture taken at Hamilton.
The gentleman is busy cooking the type.
He has got to treat a needle.
He follows very carefully with the tracing needle and a rotating round of it removes the food that was in the United States.
And this is a picture at the little.
A few years before they closed down, they actually had a local engineering company to build their PENDERGRAFT machine after their own design.
So it's one of the machine is still around.
I've heard that it will move back to Europe in the next months.
Hopefully they're going to use it again. So once the letters were cast, they had to be finished and they were finished by hand.
So the rotor bit is, is of course round and doesn't make acute corners.
So you had a whole department of people sitting there taking all these wooden characters one by one, and with a very sharp chisel,
cut the acute corners in two characters, removed the last blemishes, blemishes and burrs if there were any.
That is Hamilton. And here I've got a picture, two pictures, actually, of a north Italian country.
There were quite a few who type manufacturers in the north of Italy, about five or six.
And the gentleman at the top, he's cutting the the little planks, the wooden blocks and the one in the bottom.
He's got a little chick in front of him. He fixes the character in it, and he's got his appearance and his chisels next to it.
After the Second World War, German manufacturers started to use a kind of a bakelite called petroleum,
which is a recipe which is obtained from colonisation of phenol and formaldehyde.
Um. The Barbershop guys writer German found.
This is a picture of that stuff. They had a brand name they sold it on.
And then black adult which comes from blackout for both to endure from heart is extremely hard it's beautiful it prints fantastic it's a bit brittle,
so it sometimes breaks in bits. Manufacturers like Nebbiolo in Italy and Kilo Graff Yoshihiro No KG here and
each year they also produce a lot of poster type in ornaments and plastics.
This is a site full of one of these black outdoor types.
This is a layer to ascend. Which one? So you've got a top layer and bottom.
And between it, a harder layer. So to see. And this is some plastic type made in the north of Italy.
The Cut-outs they rooted out at the bottom to save weight and they managed to make them extremely small,
even like 50 millimetres tape was made in plastic.
We go a step further. We go to other manufacturing methods since the revival of letterpress printing.
People have started looking at new ways of making type or printing blocks.
A whole new generation of letterpress printers doesn't even handle metal or wood type anymore.
They only print from photo polymer plates. And in the U.S., this technique has been referred to as Mac Letterpress.
You've got your Macintosh, you make your design, you get a photo polymer, your plate made a print from the photo polymer plate.
However, several innovative ways of making prototypes have been and are still being explored.
The fastest way to make those type is probably to laser cut the characters in thin material and to a fixed them
to a base a technique similar to the one used by Hamilton when they started selling their furniture type.
The thin material could be plywood, but also light volume, acrylic or Perspex.
This is a photograph of a sheet of three.
Mm. Light. This has been laser cut.
This is a large, quite a large found of numerals.
It's a bold photograph. You can see that everything is already marked up to be fixed to the base.
Here is already a series of the ones that have been affixed with a very strong glue,
and you leave it under pressure overnight and then you can finish it off.
Here it is, all neatly finished.
Three layers of shellac. And that's used a whole lot. And it allows you to print perfectly.
And you will still have to type effect. The New North Press in London.
They've successfully 3D printed a very intricate typeface.
After less successful tests to print the individual character to type height,
they finally opted for a three millimetres thick layer that was glued to MDF.
Here is the image of the computer screen.
It's a lace like typeface. And here you can see it being later printed.
And fixed to the blocks. One of the students of the funded high school in eight, often in the Netherlands.
Lucia Lucia Bloomberg. She experimented with a laser engraver and different materials such as MJF, cardboard and acrylics.
And even in ordinary cardboard you can cut.
And when you finish it off with a diluted PVA glue and you can print from it, no problem.
Several workshops in Europe and the U.S. Now you see and see around computer numerical control risers and APC to produce poster type.
All different materials can be used, but the preferred material seems to be about.
This is a piece that was made by somebody in the Netherlands.
He bought a standard router and got a whole bunch of Beirut and started making this type of brought the block with me.
So afterwards you can have a look at it and you can see he has not finished it because it's still got all the round corners.
There's no finishing done on this yet. There's no shellac on it and the little strip.
But two in two characters are the width of a circular saw.
So we would make these boards and then cut them into individual characters.
Well, a few years ago, my Scottish nephew, who had Scottish robotic systems,
announced me that he had just invented £40,000 in a new router drilling machine.
I immediately saw possibilities in making spare parts for Precious, but also for making Type one Christmas holiday.
Ross and I spent some time trying out the new software, the machine under different plastics.
Now this is what the machine looks like. You can feed it any design.
And on the left, just above the X-Y-Z sign, you see a kind of a drum.
And it's got about 36 different tools in there.
And the machine, the drum turns and the machine picks the tool that it need, turns it in and behind the door.
Behind the window. You put your little block of material, in this case, plastic,
and you start the machine and it just goes, Oh, and I brought that as well to for you to inspect.
Here it is on the computer screen. I didn't know the software that well yet.
So my curves are not excellent. But it was a good it was a good Christmas holiday.
This is the 3D simulation on the screen. And here it is.
Behind that glass door, you've got a little block and you can clearly see the outer bit.
And the material is being cool with cooling liquid.
It's a fantastic machine. It goes through the speed, you know, it's mind blowing.
Excellent. These are four different plastics that we tried.
We wanted to see which one had the best surface, but also which one would be stable enough.
These are the tests you can see the previous pictures are full colour screen black, white and grey.
And here I've got a print of it.
You can clearly see where a marked where there are still problems with the curves and the curves joining the approach.
Printing results were. Slightly different.
And after having done some more research, we opted for a different material called Del Rain, which is a thermoplastic polymer.
This is the Rio. It is much more expensive than ordinary plastics.
They use it a lot in the medical industry. They make joints with it as well.
But bacteria can't separate the advantages.
You can buy it in sheets of 25 millimetres. So you can bring it down a few millimetres to get correct type height and then you can just.
Mm. It's. There's a piece lying on the table as well.
It's quite heavy, but it's beautiful material to print with.
Six months or so after I made my test in Scotland, I spoke to a colleague and friend in Switzerland.
Duffy Coon was quite well known in the literary world and he had already in his workshop a traditional pentagram for altar machine.
And I spoke to him about the dowry and he sent me a package and he produced some samples.
It's maybe difficult to see that on the left, the darkest character is a 19 or not original 1950s character from the Healthcare family,
and Duffy didn't have two petals, but he uses the original characters as a pattern.
So in the middle you see a new one, mate, a pair of boots, and on the right he did one in dowry.
In the 1950s, the German industry norm stipulated that the characters all had to be five millimetres deep in order to print perfectly dead standards.
Everything, Duffy said to me, Listen, Thomas, if I go in and out of five millimetre deep, it will take me.
A long time. We can do less deep. You can still print perfectly well from its.
So for those who are interested, they're there on the table as well.
I was a few years later, I was sort of a breakfast in Germany and Darmstadt.
That was in 2015 and I met with Eric Speakman, another important name in letterpress printing in Turkey.
So both he and I brought our different tests that we had made by various suppliers
in Europe and the U.S. and this enabled us to compare all these different things.
And this is not a picture, by the way, from you can see the different materials from Duffy's and on the left.
So this is left is Duffy right is the original five millimetre one.
Back to Speaker one In Darmstadt.
We came to Darmstadt and we spent an Easter weekend there talking about the future of the last tight family in Germany.
But we also had time to talk about mood type. Now, here on the table, I photographed several things to some time.
There's some time that was made. The light one on the left, the H two capital H was made by Hamilton in the United States.
Eric was not too satisfied with how it was finished. The next one was made in North Germany.
Then there's an original piece of Blackadder type, and this one was made in the south of Germany.
And behind it you can just see the H2 there, made in Scotland.
So we looked at all these different things discussed and came to one conclusion.
Both, you know, there was one place in Europe where you had to get food to admit that was in Romania.
There's a couple they're husband and wife who started making talk several years
ago and they use Beechwood and they use a computer and it seems here her.
And they deliver quality.
Why Beachwood. Romania has got the largest forests of beech in Europe.
When you go to IKEA and you buy these little kitchen stools that you stand on and these butcher blocks or wheels, that's all.
Beechwood. That all comes from Romania. And these guys were able to buy all the cut offs of this factory.
Everything that the factory didn't need went to the patricians. And the G here on the right is one that was made by Peter Sugar.
They knew exactly what we wanted, what quality we wanted, and what they had to pay attention to.
So by the end of 2014,
I had started looking into the possibilities of getting a contemporary found made either or plastic or printed with a 3D printer.
I've always admired the work of a Dutch designer called Martin Miller, and I like very much his design of a typeface called Serial.
So I approached Martin and I said, Martin, I would like to get found made of wood type and I would like to do this area.
And he immediately supplied me with a file of the typeface and I could send it off to get some samples with.
And I had a few samples made in the Netherlands by the person who also did the large book.
But by that time, it. Personal problems and was not paying a lot of attention to what he was delivering.
He had all the equipment, but his mind was elsewhere. So each supplied me with something that we can see later in print that didn't stand up.
I also sent something to Romania because I wanted to compare the two.
And I got this parcel back from Romania. And I was stupefied how well it was cooked, how well it was finished, and how well it printed.
And I decided to go with these guys in Romania.
And I also had at that time the opportunity to observe and to check out some good tape made by not a Dutch designer called Mark for laughing.
And this is some more of the sample from Romania.
They did a full face and they did an outline. And there, again, it's on the table.
So it is Mark from marketing that he did something similar. He took the typeface at the top and eroded it in plywood,
but the plywood that they use is so soft that when he started printing, it immediately started breaking the way.
And you can see that in the middle. So for me, it was clear, right, to pay a little bit more and then something that would break apart.
The first time you put it on the press. So, Martin, Mary and myself, we were discussing all these samples and looking at all these different things.
And he was also curious to see what is his digital type design, which will do a letter press.
And he asked me a Thomas, can we do a test with my digital type in small on the left on a printing press.
So I made a file and we got a photo polymer plate made and we printed with that.
And here you can see Martin bent over the feeding table of the proof press looking at his 12 point type.
And while we were looking at it and discovered that he had added a brand new typeface called Questa,
and Questa is a family of typefaces that he designed with another Dutch time designing just both, and especially for the larger formats.
They made a firmer version, a little bit heavier for each, of course.
Quest I grounded. So I said to him, Hey, I like that a lot.
That would be ideal for a bigger view type, rather than taking something that is normally small and large.
It. I had in my collection.
Some very nice 19th century German wool type.
Now this was done on the Pendergraft lounger and the strokes are so thin there, the thickness of a hair.
And when you put your type together, you can see a sort of an angled body.
When you put your type together, you can see that he's very fine. He's very fine.
Strokes. They connect nicely. Well, that is not what I was after.
After something that fine that would stand up like that. So in the end I dropped Syria and I went instead for the question.
So I sent a little email to the better schools in Romania.
I said, Would you at all be able to do something like that, this fine.
And they said to me, Listen, send us the file and we'll do a test.
But they advised me to rotate to a shallower depth to avoid any problems with the world collapsing under the pressure.
So this is the file that I send them. The little yellow blocks behind it indicate how they had to cut the individual pieces of Wu-Tang.
And for The Descendants, I had to have a different size.
So most of the characters were cut to 12 line 12 because 12 sit on the continent and everything that descends below the line was cut on 16.
So you can easily combine it. They got to file.
They got back to me. This is an image of the German tendency.
This is everything in Germany. It's like even the size of the type of cases.
Everything is standardised. Deutsch changed, you know?
So. Here we are in Romania.
These are the plastic boxes in which to keep the pieces of beach.
And what they do is they put these boxes, they put a couple of racks with olive oil in it, and they close them.
And that penetrates slowly but steadily in the boot.
So the fibre becomes very nice and. Impregnated with oil.
These are the ingredients that they used to finish. So you can see extra virgin olive oil is being used.
Lots of it. They've got PUMAs powder, they've got shellac, they diluted in alcohol,
they filled it with an old, old fashioned coffee filter, and they treat the roots like that.
Before and after smoking. You can see what it does.
It makes it darker. And here we are.
Under the rotor. You can see they do the same thing as the guys in the Netherlands did.
They cut a whole series of characters. They worked out.
They've got they've created a computer program that works out how cost effectively.
They can combine characters and they measure all the piece of wood that they've got in stock and they work out,
okay, we can put that, that and that on it before even starting one.
It's a close up. And as you can see now, they improve their technique because we had such fine strokes in this character.
Normally when you root or something,
the root a bit goes straight down and here they got a different route a bit and they gave it a little bit of a slope.
So even the finest lines have got a stronger base, which is really nice.
That's. That's my found that I ordered from them.
That is, I'll give you an indication of price.
This is about €900 worth of wood type.
It's not cheap, but. It's extremely beautiful.
A few weeks after I had sent my files, a box arrived from Romania and I thought, This is my phone.
I've got it. My plan was to print a specimen sheet for the participants of a type symposium in Antwerp in the Plant Museum.
However, when unpacked, several characters were missing. And I had to print my tape specimen.
So I went ahead and. We will see some more close ups, actually.
I put the tape on the press. I made a nice composition on my largest proof press, but some characters were missing, so I thought, Right, what to do?
This is the capital. Q From the typeface. And then low and behold it came, a box came and I could finish my print just in time and many people saw it.
So I got some reactions from different people all over the world.
Somebody wanted even somebody wanted to write a book.
Somebody else went to somebody wanted to be the. Q And yeah.
And people saw it as elegant and sexy, but, you know.
That is the designer who replaced.
There were more than 10,000 likes on Facebook and I realised that it was going to be quite a successful project and.
That had to start printing with it. So the first workshop that I organised with the new type was with the designer.
He's standing third from the left and he's holding to be or not to be.
That's the question. This is in my workshop in the centre of Amsterdam.
And we were we spent the weekend working together, working out letter spacing and all that.
This is done with it as well. The Q behind it is the italic hue.
I had that cut in Perspex stuck to a piece of plywood and it's about that high and that's cool.
And it resembles a little bit like a question mark and the little asterix that I cut out there, I put it in there.
After having delivered the Christa Grounder to me, the alien tutor Petrushka from Romania contacted me again and asked if they could if
they would be allowed to add it to the growing catalogue of available typefaces.
I couldn't give them that permission, but I put them in touch with the designers and both parties came to an agreement.
The designers will receive their rights when they sell the typeface in Romania.
It's already being sold to different letterpress prints in Europe.
I know of someone in Scotland who's ordered the full font. People in Sweden and other countries have already followed.
So it is slowly but steadily becoming a success.
Moral type. All along the quest a project I kept a lot of press world informed on the progress on Facebook.
This led automatically to an exchange of information, questions and, of course, answers.
I received visitors from all over the world in a workshop in the centre of Amsterdam and was happy to show the type and discuss with them.
Among those visitors were Electra, Scott Richie and Andrea Fandetti from Slap in Rome.
We had previously met during the annual press workers meeting in Milan.
Over the years, Andrea and Elettra have been able to bring a large collection of Italian talk together,
and they had become interested in the manufacturing process itself.
They were lucky enough. To be able to spend a month in the U.S. where they had hands on experience at Hamilton Woodside I completely
museum and to refresh Wisconsin that was last year that it travelled all through the month of July.
They learned everything about that manufacturing during the week spent in the
workshops and we're happy to share some of the photographs that they took.
So we'll show you some pictures of this was taken that the slip when they were in deficit
and these are some of the Hamilton has got the largest collection of petrels in the world.
Dave Hamilton not only produced a lot of new typefaces themselves,
but every time another manufacturer closed down or went bust, they bought all the patterns.
So it's basically it's the history of American who type sits in Wisconsin.
So they've got all these little draws full of wood patterns and all the wood patterns have good indications on them for the people who manufacture.
They're all numbered and they bring them out to make you type.
You can see these are also routers, these patterns, but they're unfinished.
I know. No lacquer, no financial, no nothing. This is the pattern and the results.
So more patterns lying on the worktop. You can see the amount of drawers behind them.
This is a very coarse pattern. This is quite.
Reason pattern. This was made for a manufacturer of garments, a brand of.
Garments and they wondered who type to print a poster with.
And this is a pattern. You can see it's cut in plywood and that's just been stapled to a thicker block of plywood.
That's the router. We've seen this router already in the picture from the 1960s and it's still the same router.
It's still going strong. It's quite easy to maintain.
It's basically a couple of metal arms that move around.
As long as you keep it oiled and it will function. It's sitting on a heavy metal slab and.
You can see on the right, the large pattern on the left, a smaller character, because with the panel graphs, you can enlarge or reduce.
That's the hands of Andre was cutting.
His own type. Andre again.
With the April of George and the Patriot in the foreground.
And you can see how small they can go on the left. There's a jack there and a clamp, the little block in there.
And you go. Here's just a pattern with the indication.
They're out of steam from above. So this gives you a very good idea of how the how works.
Order out a bit seated on the right in the box. So they start with the pin, followed nicely the trail and they go smaller as well as well more.
And that is a letter I was. Finishing a large s from Slap.
Close up of the pin that follows the pattern. We go over to Slovenia.
Purple Rain is also.
Another of the participants of the letterpress works in Milan is Marco Bridge from Tipo studio Tipperary, Sunset and Luciano in Slovenia.
Margo got somehow or the other involved with a research program on invasive and alien plant and tree species in Slovenia,
which was co-funded by the urban innovative action. And they realised that some of these invasive trees were actually box elder maple
and sugar maple species that American manufactures often used for the wood type.
European manufactures often use cherry or pear. But finding tree trunks like China nowadays proves to be a problem because.
Fruit trees are nowadays low. In the old days, they grew high and people would climb on a letter to pick the fruit.
Nowadays, they're low.
They've got a machine that runs between the trees and they shake the fruit off so the trunks never get bigger than, say, ten, 15 centimetres.
So if you want to make big food type. Impossible.
Now you can make nice and small without, but you don't get that nice slap of 30 centimetre anymore.
One of the partners in this project, the Department of Science of the Bio Technical Faculty of Louisiana,
helped him make a selection of suitable butcher. Basically they cut down all these American trees in Slovenia because they're invasive.
So Markle was told, Come around with your car and you can get a couple of trees.
So up here he goes, a trailer behind his car and.
Loaded up. Free root. He cut an inch slaps.
And here you can see.
These are some of the slabs that he cut and he realised after having cut them in slabs that you had to cut the slabs in half again,
otherwise they would dry and it would kill them. So the trick was that he learned it when he went to visit the Hamilton people.
They told him, Cut your slabs, chopped them immediately in half.
Leave those half to dry. You don't get close to. You have to, of course, test for humidity.
So there is. And he had to wait a few years. Sadly enough, very little information exists about new tech manufacturing.
So he was also able to travel to the United States and he visited several people.
He visited virtually one type in Rochester. More would type in Columbus.
And you already mentioned Hamilton. By studying the specimens dare and talking to the few remaining people that still make them trip.
He was able to push on with this project. But he needed a lot of equipment.
He needed a block. Lefler, a machine to make the block exactly the same height throughout a machine like that weighs over 500 kilos.
He also needed a circular latch, so to be able to cut it to typographical dimensions.
And it took him some time, but he found the machines.
Here in the foreground with that little white thing sitting on top of it is the lasso.
And in the background, under the arch sits this enormous block.
Lefler. Often these machines were discarded in the 1970s and eighties, and they ended up somewhere in the back of a garage and.
The only thing that he was still didn't have was the graph router.
And after another search for almost a year, he found a German built machine.
An enormous machine built by a German company decal.
These machines were also used in the industry to engrave little nameplates and plates that dude affixed to machines.
You know, these plastic plates to join the door with you, with your name in it or your house number?
They used bunting for all this, actually. And these machines are similar to what the manufacturers used.
So we picked up one of those machines. And.
He. Markle has promised to pass on his knowledge and all the stuff that he experience, all the problems that he experienced.
So he's making it into a kind of a program so everybody gets involved and he gets also his students because he teaches in our school involved in this.
So the start of making here here we see the his is Pendergraft, an elder.
He has to invent basically everything for it. And he's made very interesting jigs using plywood again, and his patterns are made in Perspex.
So he gets his students as well to design new contemporary typefaces.
Then the laser of these typefaces in Perspex affix them to a woodblock and use that as a pattern to make a series of Vuitton.
He's now so successful that he's considering making it commercially available, his type.
But he is also aware of the fact that in order to be.
Competitive with the manufactures of sea and sea around us that he has to lower its price.
This is, of course, much more work than doing a sincere doubter, insincere after you put your block of material down.
You push the button and the machine goes. And here you have to follow it three, four, sometimes five times, depending on the size of your type.
You can see on the right he's following the Perspex pattern, and on the left he cuts a series of lowercase A's.
So he'd been in the States. He had gone to the church and would type. Which and this is not a picture of his pattern.
This is a. Uh, a character.
It's a typeface that one of the students signed it. It's got all the accents for.
The Eastern European languages as well.
You'll see a small laser printout. He's got some ligatures.
Question mark. Everything that you need for modern day typesetting.
Virgin who died on one of his trips to the states he also visited.
Fortune looked like Fortune would type was started by the late Bill Jones and his wife, Jeri McCormick.
They were able years ago to acquire the Pendergraft route and the patterns that had been used by the American group type.
Manufacturing company in 2009 and had started manufacturing type in 2010.
The American roots are patterns include those from Acme Wood type, allied root type as well.
And as AGW turned out to be the result of the British Stevenson and Blick products, some of these British patents were also included in the sale.
The funding graph that is being used by America by Virgin type dates back to the 1950s and was custom
built to mildew Woodside to type out its first code cut into billets or slabs of one inch one sizes,
then send it to other sites, milled and finished with three coats of shellac.
The next step is to cut these blanks.
They use a Hammond collider trim or so the Hammond glider trimmer is on a circular saw that you would find in every print shop in the world.
And because when you want to cut metal, type down or let slugs down, you use this machine.
So searching who types? This is the workspace.
Here. They've got these blanks ready. They cut them in different sizes for different type heights and different sizes.
Nicely finished. Sea. Small. Medium, large.
And they use patterns as well they could.
They use the patterns slightly larger to what they do. They always go from large pattern to a smaller type.
So you also have to know a little bit about what role to take.
And often it is by years of experience that you know exactly when to do this kind of type on that project when they do that.
And then Robert Bill, who had no previous experience in making you type and I had nobody around who could show me
how to do this was in the process of discovering all the final nuances of manufacturing.
Who type when you fell ill? Sadly enough, he passed away in 2012 with but before his death he was able to pass on everything,
all his knowledge that he already had to his wife and his assistant and Jerry took over after his death.
They were based in Rochester and they offer Victorian and contemporary design
and they work with contemporary designers as well for new modern typefaces.
So they've got brand new, exciting typefaces that have never been available in world before.
And they work closely together with the P22 type foundry.
The P22 type foundry is a digital type foundry, so these guys sell typefaces for the computer.
Here. You can see on this picture, you can clearly see the small tools that they used to finish off to type.
See there again, they've got a Jake the Clampett. And then they.
Clean it. Before sending it off.
They make what they call a carbon proof.
You put a tape down on the back of the press, you put a piece of carbon paper, old fashioned cardboard paper, with the ink right up.
We put a blank sheet of paper on it, pull it through the press, and you get an impression.
And that allows you to check your type before sending it off and the customer will receive virgin muted.
There's no ink on the type. Thank you very much.
This was my little story about would I have been allowed?
Thank you.