21st Century Marriage, 19th Century Style

The thing that drew me to letterpress printing nearly 25 years ago was the type. Seeing all of these disparate letters and ornaments come together to create limitless imagery and text had me hooked from Day One. It’s one of the reasons I still focus on crafting all pieces from metal and wood type, alongside the fact that centenary type still has a lot of life to live and it’s the most eco-friendly option for printing.
This spring I printed wedding invitations for a couple who also love the idea of working with historic metal types. They particularly liked the styles within the Yes We Can Can collection of invitations, given that this set focuses on 19th century type and ornament.

When starting a custom project, I chat with folks to get a sense of what they want and love, as well as the basic specs that are required. Then I look through the collection to pull ideas from the type and ornament that seem most appropriate. Here are a few of the proof cards that contain type samples from the studio that could work for this job.

Most of the type I have is printed and scanned into my computer, with a few exceptions that are easier to set specifically for a given project. I then build a digital composite that’s pretty close to what the final looks like, so that we can work quickly via pdfs to tweak what will be the final design. This is a snippet of the digital proof.

Then the type gets pulled and set. I really enjoy the physicality of this process, of getting all of the ornaments in place and the type aligned. A few non-19th century faces also made their way into the mix.You can see evidence of this throughout time, as shops added new typefaces and combined them with the old. And some newer typefaces are design with a nod to the past and ‘play well’ with their older cousins.
This invitation also features mortised initials, used for the first letter of their names. They have a long extension– the piece of type is not the standard rectangle but more L-shaped– so that they can be combined with other typefaces.

Much of this beautiful type is well over 100 years old. I have a decent collection that I keep in boxes for its protection and to easily find what I need when I need it.

Some of the ornaments used for this invitation were made by MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan, formerly of Philadelphia, though many of mine are marked ‘Johnson’, the foundry that predates but became MSJ. This means they’re likely closer to 150 years old. The specimen book I reference in the studio dates to 1890.

These beautiful pages show endless samples of border and ornament collections and are incredibly helpful when it comes to figuring out how they’re all meant to come together. They function as both a sales tool and a glorious sampling of design work at the time, or at least design work to which one could aspire.

Erica and Adam wanted an image that included hummingbirds on the back of their invitations so I started from these sources to get ideas for something that would be in keeping with the rest of the ornaments.

I sketched a number of elements from the book and retooled them to be appropriate for the project.

When absolutely necessary, I have magnesium plates made for custom imagery that’s too detailed or small for linoleum cuts. The magnesium is mounted on wood that makes it type high, or the same height as all of the other type (.918”, just shy of one inch).

I also recently cleaned up some old brass dashes that make an appearance on this invitation. Again, something that dates back a century and prints just as well today.

Here’s a close up of the front of the invitation. There’s so much detail in these old faces that’s difficult to achieve for printing today, though some are trying and succeeding, as evidenced by my pal, Val!

And… if you’re a fan of these gorgeous typefaces, I just produced a set of cards for the Print Club that are now available for everyone. These feature many of the ornamental sets in the studio, paired with funny acronyms/phrases of today.

I know a lot of designers prefer the digital world and its seemingly endless options for typefaces and ornament in their work. While the collection of physical type slowly grows in the shop, I’m learning more about the craft of creating with these pieces over time, both in terms of their original purpose as well as what can happen when they are approached with a modern sensibility. Ornament falls in and out of fashion all the time, but this type persists, patiently sitting in cases, waiting for the right moment to wow an audience.

The Twelve Alphabet

In early 2021, I had the idea for a book of letterforms built entirely from 12 point metal type ornaments. This arose following a year of non-stop hustle to keep the studio afloat and the desire to do something that was a creative challenge of my own making. A mental cleanse. A brain break.
Metal type and ornament is measured in points, with 12 points making up a pica and 6 picas forming an inch. I love collecting ornaments that work on a typographic base 12 system of measurement because they play well together: 6, 12, 18, 24 and 36 point ornaments are the most plentiful at Starshaped.
For this project, I decided any ornament in the collection that had 12 points on at least one side would qualify. In the image below, you can see that some ornaments measure 12x(insert length), can be corners for 12 point borders and are therefore L-shaped, or are 6 point ornaments that are double length. This made for endless possibilities.

Almost as soon as new-to-me type enters the studio, I print black and white proofs of it to have a visual representation of the collection. I also scan these and create digital cheat sheets to pull from when building digital mockups for projects and client work.
Thanks to the wonderful casting talents of Pat Reagh, my 12 point ornament collection increased significantly around the time of developing this project. Below is a screen shot of one section of the digital repository of my collection. I find this visual reference tool incredibly helpful when designing.

I began by looking at all types of letterforms and deciding there would not be a cohesive alphabet but instead a variety that could show off different ornamental styles. Then I sketched myriad options before slowly starting to refine the final layouts. Many have curves and there’s a limit to how to create these shapes with rectilinear metal type. I had to keep in mind its capabilities and referred to the above cheat sheets often, looking for non-solid, or non-square shapes within the very solid metal body of the physical piece of type. I often point out seeing positive vs. negative space to folks working with ornaments when building shapes, like in this Weekend Printer post.

I laid out all of the designs in a 6” square assuming a 12” page size (for obvious reasons) on the computer. Below is the first iteration of the whole alphabet. Many of these would change as I started the typesetting as there would be shortages of some of the ornaments or the occasional ‘that just isn’t right’ moments. These digital guides are just that— guides for getting the setting off the ground so there are fewer problems to solve, not an elimination of all problem solving.

The other nice thing about having digital proofs is playing around with the color to make sure it was to my liking. More on that later.
The files are also built on a grid, meaning I could block out the spacing material which is equally important, especially given that these would be printed in two passes with extremely tight registration. This sheet shows marking up what small furniture and spacing was needed to fill in around the ornaments.

I set up time lapse videos for setting all of the letterforms, one of which is here. Planning ahead with all of the ornaments and spacing pulled meant actual setting time was about an hour. I built the form on top of the computer print out of the letterform, which is often how I discovered a shortage of ornaments or a problem with the setting that needed correcting. After it was completed, I slid the paper out.
As an aside, I’ve had ridiculous comments lobbed at me by certain people in the letterpress community for using the computer for laying out projects, as if it’s not a ‘pure’ enough tool for composition. I’ve spent the last 20+ years collecting, cataloging, cleaning, meticulously identifying, proofing and USING the type and ornament that comes into the studio. I use it for every project produced at Starshaped, which is my full time job. I do this because I don’t want to use polymer (plastic!) plates and want to carry on the life of what I think is a beautiful typographic art form that people can have access to if I show them what it can do. I show them by having the means to quickly mock up their projects; I could do all of this work by hand at twice the time, which cuts into my bottom line. The computer is a tool, just like all of the other tools in the shop. Get thee off thy high horses, gentlemen.

Here are some of the images taken while setting the individual letterforms, which were done one at a time and produced, as time allowed, over a few months. There are so many things I love about metal ornaments, but for this project in particular, I loved creating larger elements from many smaller pieces, or what felt like long running lines from disjointed ornaments. It’s so beautifully adaptable and credit goes to so many designers, many of whom we will never know much about.

After setting each letter, I pulled a carbon paper proof, using good ol’ carbon paper instead of inking it, for a quick idea of what it would look like.

While I love the challenges of creating with metal type, proper inking makes me sweat a lot more. Each letter would be printed in two color passes, but each one would involve a split ink fountain, meaning there were two colors on the press at the same time that gently meld together in the middle (Tribune Showprint are masters of the rainbow split fountain). I established a color palette of what those splits would be and the number of combinations that could exist so that only two letterforms had the same. I mixed all of the inks ahead of time so they’d be consistent across all of the printing. They conveniently fit in the Farmer’s Fridge containers we saved from pandemic orders and hospital visits.

I proofed an entire letter with the first split color to make sure all alignment and set up was correct before pulling out the ornaments that would be used for the second color pass. You can see there’s a very gentle color shift from top to bottom.

Color separations are always a tricky thing (I’ve also written more extensively about color seps on The Weekend Printer). Once I’ve got the placement established, I pull out all of the color that’s not being printed and try to mark its location by tagging the spacing used to replace it with paint marker. Then, when the first color is finished, I put the next color back in and take out all of the ornaments that were just printed. I try to keep the ‘on deck’ ornaments roughly in location on a galley; I love the look of these little faces lined up and ready to go.

The paper is Zerkall, one of my favorites that is sadly no longer available. It comes in large sheets with fluffy edges and needs trimming to size. I cut the sheets larger than needed so all of the pages can be collated and trimmed together at the end.

The title page and colophon were also printed in various 12 point types. I love this main typeface, Cleft Gothic, as it’s a basic gothic with a little surprise in it, which seemed appropriate for the project. It was a surprise when I got it as well, hiding amongst another gothic in a job case that went unnoticed until I started to clean it and saw pretty quickly that there were two faces on the caps side of the case.

Here are the pages laid out for collation, after going through them to pull out any less-than prints.

A smattering of pages and close ups! I think it’s fair to say you wouldn’t know all of the ornaments used have 12 points along one side if I didn’t tell you. The depth and variety of designs of the ornaments and how they are placed on the body is so different that the possibilities are endless. This is why I love metal type and never feel that it’s too limiting.

Just prior to digging into the book, I printed a prospectus in order to explore the idea of creating letterforms in this method. The number ‘12’ was printed with a subtle split fountain but with a reduced set of ornaments along a theme that went from thin curves to fat ones to create another gradation.

I liked that idea so I carried it through for the cover of the book, too. It would just be one color, with the weight of the ‘12’ changing from heavy to light because of the surface value of the ornaments themselves. I followed the same process of sketching out ideas for the shape and then playing around with what ornaments would achieve this goal.

Initially I thought the binding would be more involved and sewn. I tried a number of versions of this and was deeply unhappy with every one of them, as the sewing looked too soft and sloppy next to the bold, graphic ‘12’. Then I tried screw posts and immediately felt a connection with their subtle, industrial feel. It matched the overall tone without detracting from it. I’m so pleased with this collection of letterforms, with how they came together and what they say about my collection of type and its endless possibilities.

While most of the edition of 40 now resides in libraries and private collections, the remaining copies are available here. There were also a handful of individual prints of each letter outside of the edition that are now available to purchase here.

Field Notes

Over the summer of 2020, I, along with 9 other printer/designers, created a limited edition Field Notes notebook. In the midst of a global pandemic and viscerally witnessing and feeling the loss around me, in life and life’s work, I wanted my design to be a tiny nod to the spaces that make a community home. A safe community. A connected community.
These are some candid shots of the building and printing process. See the wonderful short doc Field Notes did on the entire series. Some notebooks are available for purchase in the shop. Please continue to support these independent makers and all of the ones in your community.

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The City Is My Religion — Requiem

I wrote a requiem when I turned 40. It was for a part of myself that bore a nagging, persistent allowance of words that diminished me and the work of my hands, words that always came from men. I could wax on about why they did this but tomes have been written on the subject already; I could address why I tolerated it but this is also well-covered ground.
The only pseudo-apology I’ve received from a man was ‘sorry, I thought you were a boy.’ I think of this whenever I’m put in a position with a man who wants me to demur to his authority or knowledge so that I’m forced to pause before the words ‘sorry’ or ‘apologize’ escape from me. Because more often than not, it’s a power play and my knowledge is just as powerful.
I constantly correct my child on apologizing: If I say ‘do your laundry’ then do your laundry; it doesn’t require an apology for not having done it. It requires saying ‘okay’ and doing it. No offense has been committed. I’m not sending a child into the world apologizing for their very existence.
I see criticisms of women’s work on social media and the woman posting is quick to apologize for whatever the commenter deemed insufficient. I message her to say ‘Don’t apologize for the work you put in the world!’ More often than not, the troll has nothing in their own feed to indicate they have any advanced knowledge of the subject and if they were truly invested in helping, they’d do it directly and privately and not in a humiliating fashion. It’s a power play.

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I’ve tried, whenever possible, to collaborate with other women in my field and have had deeply satisfying results on personal and professional levels. Sometimes a friendship goes years in search of a project and other times I cold call a woman I admire to see if there’s a collaboration waiting to happen.
In 2016, I worked with Jessie Reich of Three Ton Bridge Type Foundry, operating out of the Bixler Letterfoundry in Upstate NY, to create two Chicago Collections of metal ornaments based on architectural elements in the city. You can read more about this project here.

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And in 2017 I had the pleasure of collaborating with Geri McCormick of Virgin Wood Type, also in NY, to create two sets of wood type ornaments drawn from looser, prairie-style ornament. Read about developing Ida and Lucy here.

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Clearly a print in my typographic memoir needed to cover the fact that I was a woman in print, that I worked in letterpress at a time when it was gaining greatly in popularity and transitioning from a male dominated field to a female one. So I collected many of the things men said to me over the years and wrote them down. Some were actually sent in letters and postcards and I kept them but don’t want to give the senders any more space here than they deserve.
It felt important to use all type designed by women for this print. But therein lies the conundrum– there isn’t much, or at least it isn’t specifically documented and credited to women. So I started with my own ornaments mentioned above, arranged in quilt-like patterns as a nod to a traditionally female craft.

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In the winter of 2017 I had the wonderful opportunity to meet Caryl Seidenberg in her home north of Chicago. Moving away from making books, she was selling most of her collection, including a nearly complete run of the typeface Elizabeth, designed by Elizabeth Friedlander. After a delightful morning of looking at her past projects and gleaning what I could from someone who also balanced work and motherhood, I left with all of the Elizabeth type. The Newberry Library has a small archive of materials about Friedlander, including Pauline Paucher’s wonderful book about her life and work. A Jew working in Germany in the late 30s, she was forced to flee to Italy and then England, where she continued to live and work following the war. It’s a story worth reading if you can, even if it requires digging and visiting your special collections library.

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I think of the phrase ‘I forbid you to continue to practice your profession’ whenever I’m confronted with sexism because any ‘ism’ is based on the supposition that a perceived flaw prevents one from effectively producing or being something, that your ‘otherness’ is a disability. And after I think about it for a minute, I figure out how to do whatever it was I was told I couldn’t do in a more thoughtful and engaging way to show that I could do it. And this is why anyone marked out as ‘other’ from the ‘norm’ should be listened to; this extra hurdle is where the very seed of innovation is planted.

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On May 7th, 2017, my neighbor called me to come home immediately as my house was on fire. By the time I arrived, there were firefighters on the roof, punching holes in it to allow for the release of smoke as the fire itself was out. The rest of the evening was a blur of insurance calls, board ups, neighbors checking in, consoling my child (the electrical fire started in their room and it was a near total loss) and coping with the shock. This image encapsulates so much of that; it shows the layers of my 100 year old home exposed in a near instant.

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My little house is a huge source of pride for me. We purchased it in a perfect storm of dumb luck that I never thought would happen: the height of the recession with drastically falling home prices, my husband had steady and rising income from working one job as opposed to several (rare for a stagehand) and Obama’s $8000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers. I had my heart set on one of Chicago’s historic tiny brick bungalows and we got it.

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Chicago is well known for its 1871 Great Fire. It took the city about 3 years to rebuild from those damages. It took 9 months to rebuild our home, an excruciating process of constantly calling contractors and cleaning and fighting with utilities and hand-wringing, all while attempting to make life feel normal for a child and running a business. And at the end of May, I dragged my tank of a sewing machine, still reeking of smoke, to Jo’s school to make costumes for the school play. It wasn’t until a while later that Jo realized the irony of being cast as Mrs. O’Leary in a play about Chicago’s history.
And so I built a print to memorialize this time much the way the city was rebuilt on top of sedimentary layers, only my layers were of type dating back to the fire, with my little house resting on top. Then they were printed in earthen, ashen shades.

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To add flames, I created a 3-color reduction linoleum cut, printing, then carving away at it multiple times to print depth.

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The final print:

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I wish I could say the fire experience came with growth, that renovation gave my walls a satisfying symmetry, that I’m relieved our electrical work is up to code. But I can’t. It left a constant, quiet dread, knowing that one day you can leave your home and come back to find it on fire and that you have no control over this. That your definition of ‘home’ and ‘safe’ can vary greatly from your friends and community. That losing a home is like losing a loved one and when someone says ‘but look, you can get a new renovation!’ it’s akin to ‘look, you can get a new child/mother/husband!’ when they die. It wasn’t until the Paradise, California fires when I heard a therapist working with families there express this loss in a way that made me feel understood. That grieving and fear is appropriate. That it’s normal to look at your child when you’re both leaving together and the house is alone by itself, with an unspoken understanding of these feelings.
When our renovation was taking place, its very nature of removing the damage meant removing nearly every bit of handiwork my late husband put into the house and it was like losing him a second time. I was lucky to find a few ‘easter eggs’ in the rubble, including this piece he buried behind drywall in the attic.

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These little artifacts are important because they are finite, having lost Mr. S in 2016. He was fiery and passionate about many things, but they largely boiled down to two: his love of his job as a union stagehand coupled with the respect he had for his fellow workers, and his deeply held belief that everyone deserved equality and a start on a level playing field. That meant that if he wasn’t enjoying a cheap beer in our yard, he was at the theater or at a protest rally for whatever underdog needed a loud voice (and he had one). At one of the Newberry Library’s Bughouse Square debates, I watched him heckle Quentin Young while he spoke about the problems of the AMA and the need for single payer health care, something Mr. S actually believed in. Afterwards, he approached Young to shake his hand and say, ‘I believe in everything you said, but I think it’s important to have a lively debate’ and they laughed. If that’s not Chicago, I don’t know what is.

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I focused the print about his life on the last few months of it because it was in this time that Mr. S’s long-held beliefs in the strengths and benefits of unions (not always a popular opinion) paid dividends. Over the nine months of his illness, the union showed up in every possible way to support us, thereby validating his lifelong struggle to defend them. Even in the hospital, coming out of anesthesia, he discovered his nurses weren’t in a union and he offered to start one on their behalf.
So I stuck to all the simple, sans serif typefaces, not unlike what we’d see at so many rallies and marches, and organized them into what could either be a sea of posters or the curve of a theatrical proscenium arch. The center pulls specifically from Billy Bragg’s ‘There is Power in a Union.’

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Overlapping ornaments point the eye upward, doubling as footlights or poles for the posters.

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The shapes of the blocks of text were printed with rough linoleum blocks and then hand inked for a little dimension with this down-and-dirty frisket.

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Before Broadway went dark in March, we saw a production of Hadestown, a stunning, modern telling of Orpheus & Eurydice. While we know this is tragedy and long for a different outcome, Hermes is there to emphatically remind us ‘it’s an old tale… it’s a sad song… but we’re going to sing it again.’ The cast follows the performance with an ask for donations to Broadway Cares, an organization founded to help those in the industry fight HIV/AIDS when the rest of the country chose to ignore it, and has grown to help the entire Broadway family when in need. They helped my family in our hour of need. As we left the theater and dropped money in the red bucket, I thought ‘what widow placed money in this bucket five years ago that helped me and my child?’ Hermes was right.

I didn’t write this particular requiem and I can’t change the lyrics. But I, too, will sing it again and again.

This is the second of four posts about The City is my Religion.
Read the first here.