I was delighted to speak recently to Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl, a long-term voice of reason and source of excellence knowledge on language. You can listen to the audio in your favorite podcast app or via a browser, or watch on YouTube.
I’m down to the last 50 24 copies (as of September 2024) of my book Six Centuries of Type & Printing. If you were interested in a copy, now is the time! The price includes the letterpress edition, an expanded book edition (which features a full bibliography), and U.S. shipping.
Back in 2019, when I launched the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule project, I envisioned a short edition of a book to include with the museum. The museum would have artifacts, uniquely created items, and a “curator’s manual” specific to what was included, the book would have a broader scope. As always, I was probably too ambitious to build out the museum and book at the same time—even with project partner Anna Peterson née Robinson, the fine woodworker who built the gorgeous cases. But when the pandemic
2022 is probably the first year in my working life I have done less than in the previous year. That’s all to the good: I am often scurrying around from project to project and spinning lots of plates. It was nice to have a calmer year and build in more time off in my second half-century of life.
To get announcements about my new projects, you can sign up for my legitimately low-volume mailing list—I sent out just seven messages in 2022!
This year’s summary is thus a little simpler, too!
2022 was my second banner year for books. Starting during the first pandemic year, I devoted myself to writing new titles in the Take Control Books roster. In 2021, that involved four new books and updates to several more—some multiple times. In 2022, I wrote just two entirely new books and significantly updated another
Searching for old photos recently, I uncovered my senior project in graphic design. I majored in Art at Yale with a subject concentration in graphic design, and this work was my part of my graduation requirement for the major. I had a strong interest in type design, and was encouraged by a mentor to produce a high-quality digital version of the typeface Albertus. Albertus had been designed in the 1930s by Berthold Wolpe, and it was one that in the late 1980s wasn’t yet available in a strong digital rendition. I’ve scanned the project for my own posterity and you can download it here. Missing, sadly, are pictures of the large exhibition posters that I created as part of my project.
You can see the child of the adult in
I sadly just heard the news that The Type Archive in London will be moved from its location and its collections put into storage. The announcement by the Science and Museum Group (SMG), a set of quasi-public institutions that operates independently, doesn’t sugarcoat things. The Type Archive preserved the typefounding and wood-type history of the United Kingdom; they overlapped in part with the St Bride Library (or St Bride Printing Library), which has a smaller piece of typefounding history and more generally preserves UK printing history.
The Type Archive was led for decades by Sue Shaw, once an editor at Faber & Faber and other publishers, who became a fierce and relentless advocate for the preservation of Monotype’s manufacturing plant for its hot-metal type production equipment and its archives, as well as pulling in centuries of type foundry history acquired from Stephenson
A recent visit to the local farmers’ market led to this long essay about blackletter, German type, Otto von Bismarck, Nazis, and the dangers of typeface selection.
