Just days after writing up the third anniversary of the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule project on this blog, the final seven museums sold in a flurry of interest. The book, Six Centuries of Type & Printing, remains exquisite and fully available. You can order it here. Read an excerpt.
A real milestone today: all the museums ordered to date have been shipped as of this morning! Museums ordered during the Kickstarter campaign and pre-orders through nearly the end of 2019 were fulfilled by November, and then pre-orders that came in after that were shipped in November and December. (One poor museum has been in transit since December 9! It wasn’t lost…just resting, I guess. It’s finally out for delivery today.)
93 of the edition of 100 museums are now sold and 90 of those delivered or shipped. (Three people improbably, after more than a year of cajoling, have not yet sent me their shipping addresses.) Update: February 10, 2021—now 95 are sold and 1 of the missing buyers has appeared!
Seven museums from the edition remain available for order. I have a few in reserve beyond that, held in case of damage or loss in
I’m pleased to announce the first Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsules have shipped as of last Friday. As I get feedback on the arrival of museums from “curators,” I am tweaking packing and other parameters as I ramp up to ship the nearly 80 museums ready to go over the next few weeks. The remainder of pre-orders (placed starting around November 2019) will ship late this year.
With recent pre-orders, I am now down to roughly 12 museums left for sale. You can still order one for delivery around December 2020!
(We are making 100 with some extras in case of shipping damage or other problems, so until 100 museums are received, we won’t know precisely if we have a few left.)
I’ve held off posting on this blog for a while as the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule project was on hold as some final steps for completing the museum cases could not be completed. Washington State’s restrictions on businesses prevented Anna Robinson, the case designer and maker, from having access to any woodworking shop with the right equipment.
Then the USPS situation erupted, and this project was built in part around affordable, safe, and timely shipping by that postal service. That remains unresolved, but at least there’s clarity the current situation is a problem, and one hopes it will be improved in the next few weeks and months.
And Anna was able to get back into a shop in July, and I took delivery of 77 completed cases a few weeks ago, representing all Kickstarter backer museum rewards and orders promised for early 2020 delivery in
Keith Houston talks about the past and present of the book, which has remained a remarkably consistent form since its invention millennia ago. We talk about bookiness, elements of a book, ebooks, and emoji, among other topics.
Keith is the author of Shady Characters and The Book, and maintains an active blog at which he posts ongoing articles on his current subject of interest. Right now, that’s been a long-running series on emoji that’s great reading, like all of his work.
Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts or through your favorite podcasting app via its directory or this podcast URL.
I posted a long update on Kickstarter that anyone can read (not just Kickstarter backers) about the current state of the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule. Anna Robinson will be delivering 80 completed cases to me in about two to three weeks. The books are about to go on press and thence to the binder. The last artifacts have arrived. I have a number of additional boxes to check towards completion, but shipping by January 31 remains highly likely for the first 80 backers and pre-orderers.
Because some people are paying for museums in installments, a few orders placed by the end of January will be shipped as part of the first batch. However, the official shipping date for orders placed today is no later than July 2020. I hope to deliver those as early as April or May, but out of the same prudence in setting a schedule
I’m happy to note five digital accessions to the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule. While the museums are largely focused on analog items, there are five digital items that I’ve arranged to include for their historic and informative value. A USB stick included in the museum will contain this items along with a number of public-domain films and books useful for further study.
Robert Green became mildly obsessed with the beauty of the type cut for the Doves Press starting in 1899 and used for all its works. A many of many talents—a graphic designer, book restorer, type designer, and more, who received his master’s from the Royal College of Art—he wanted to take this extraordinary type and produce a digital version authentic to its roots.
The type is legendary, because of a dispute between
The Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule is a tribute is a celebration I’m creating of type and printing, and an effort at preserving history for future generations to re-discover. Each custom, handmade wood museum case holds a couple dozen genuine artifacts from the past, including a paper mold for casting newspaper ads in metal, individual pieces of wood and metal type, a phototype “font,” and a Linotype “slug” (set with your own message), along with original commissioned art, a letterpress-printed book recounting six centuries of type and printing history, and a few replicas of items found in printing shops.
I funded the production of dozens of these tiny type museums via Kickstarter in February 2019, and will use this blog to document the acquisition and creation of artifacts for the museums and the museum’s case. I’ll also keep you up
I’ll have more to say about this soon, of course, but I finished printing the book’s last piece—the cover, naturally—on Wednesday. Everything is in the hands of the bookbinder, and she’s started to work.
Once the letterpress book starts shipping to backers, I’ll talk about next steps: the ebook release, an offset edition, and some elements of the letterpress book that will be available separately, since I wound up with a bit more than I needed to fulfill the numbered edition. (No other copies will be numbered, but I will have some artist’s proofs.)
This week was also busy because the School of Visual Concepts screened the movie Pressing On, an emotionally fulfilling and deep film about the end of an era of letterpress paired with handing off the torch, as much as feasible. I moderated a panel with four of our local
Hi, folks!
When I planned the Kickstarter campaign for this book project, I made exclusive updates part of the deal — I wanted to make sure everyone had the opportunity to follow along with my work, so you’d learn as I did, and I’d share things I already knew along the way.
But here’s the thing: I feel like I’m hiding my light under a bushel. Part of my goal with this project and with my Designer in Residence role at the School of Visual Concepts is to cross the divide of digital and analog. That requires communicating it, and I think everyone might be better served, and I’ll feel like my project has a broader creative and social goal, by making posts from this backer’s blog public.
Ultimately, I’ll be using some of the writing on this blog as the basis of essays
To make it easier to stay up to date with this blog, you can subscribe to a patrons-only email list, which will send new posts to you in the form of email. You can also receive updates via this RSS feed in a newsreader.
I've set up this hidden blog on my site to keep you up to date on Hands On: the Original Digital as the project proceeds. I'll post updates, photos, and videos here for backers; some of this material will appear elsewhere in different form, but you'll get the full inside skinny.
Subscribe to a patrons-only mailing list to receive new blog posts via email. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed of this blog via this link.
(Note: I removed the password for this patrons-only blog because it didn't allow RSS to work properly. It's security-through-obscurity, so the blog remains secret so long as no one distributes the link or links to it. There's nothing classified here; it's just meant for patrons.)