A Visit to Letterform Archive (The Tiny Typecast)
The long-delayed debut of the Tiny Typecast is here! Last year, I recorded four episodes for this podcast notion. My focus on keeping the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule moving along kept me from pulling the episodes together. But I’m glad to say with the majority of museums on the verge of shipping (in late March), I’ve finally been able to knuckle down.
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This first episode is an interview with three key people at Letterform Archive, a remarkable institution in San Francisco that preserves the history of design as a tool of communication. I spoke with founder and executive director Rob Saunders, associate curator and editorial director Stephen Coles, and then librarian Amelia Grounds. (She has since moved on to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley after four years at the archive.)
The archive’s collection spans the history of printing starting with European printing types—including a few pages of a Gutenberg Bible—and encompasses specimen books, production and process artwork, magazines and journals, and important rare and common works across design history. It’s a living resource for current designers, a treasure trove for historians, and a publishing house that‘s produced or has in production three remarkable works so far.
You can view a set of photos at Flickr I took of the tour before the interview and other photos taken afterwards. This includes a photo of the Paul Rand production artwork mentioned in the episode, the book bound with flongs, and a close-up of the Dwiggins’ book printed with stochastic screening.
Letterform Archive lost its long-term home, and has been raising funds since last summer for a move to a new, larger, more accessible location not far away. You can contribute and gain access to their incredible digitized collection and support an extraordinary independent nonprofit that is graphic design’s collective memory.
The show’s theme includes mechanical elements from Sounds of Change, an archive of freely available recordings of industrial equipment. The theme uses “Linotype N-14 – line casting” (sound recordist, Monika Widzicka) and “Heidelberg platen press,” in use at the Finnish Labour Museum Werstas. Used under Creative Commons license.