Glenn Fleishman Interrogates the Past

A Milestone in Museums

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

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Museums Ahoy and Many Thanks

The process of filling each museum with all the dozens and dozens of goodies, from tiny slivers of metal type to large pieces of wood type and custom type slugs.

November was a month of shipping Tiny Type Museums & Time Capsules, with a few more that went out in December, and another batch nearly ready to go. The stats so far:

93 backed in the original Kickstarter campaign or pre-ordered—and now, technically, ordered as all museum cases are on hand
76 shipped (all Kickstarter museums and pre-orders through 2019); only a few remain in the gentle hands of USPS and UPS
10 more ready to go in the next few days (ordered in 2020 for delivery between June and December)
7 waiting on type slugs or current address (at least 30 people have moved or changed shipping addresses this year), shipping later in December or during January

This

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Tiny Type Museums Are Shipping

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!

Museum bottom drawers in the final stages of prep before packing.

(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.)

Boxes heading out to the local P.O. We support the USPS!

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The Imminent Shipment of Tiny Type Museums

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

printing history

Jeremy Burge, Chief Emoji Officer of Emojipedia (The Tiny Typecast)

Emoji are the first kind of symbolic element designed to read only online that’s also difficult, sometimes impossible, to reproduce accurately in print—or in a static electronic document, like a PDF. In this episode, I talk with Jeremy Burge, the chief emoji officer of Emojipedia, a site that exhaustively documents the past and present of those popular pictographs. He also helps chart the future as a member of the Unicode Consortium group that considers adding new emoji to the official Unicode set.

Jeremy and I talk about the issues of permanence with emoji: they can change appearance over time, they differ among graphical presentations in different operating systems and services (like Facebook and Twitter), and they largely require color output. How can you be sure what you see on screen is the same on another screen, and how can you possibly include emoji in a book, or archive

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Order a Museum or Book

You can pre-order one of the few remaining Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsules (ships third-quarter 2020) or order a copy of Six Centuries of Type & Printing (ships immediately) from my online store.

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David Sax, Revenge of Analog and the Soul of an Entrepreneur (The Tiny Typecast)

This podcast looks backward to understand the present and future, and there is nobody better on the business side than David Sax. The author of three books—on delis, on the revival of analog culture, and on the right way to look at entrepreneurship—David’s insights help give us insight into the joy people feel in letterpress printing and the way in which cottage businesses dominated the world, and still do. Printing and letterpress aficionados will particularly like his 2016 title, The Revenge of Analog.

David Sax, Author of The Revenge of Analog and The Soul of an Entrepreneur

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David Sax believes the lifeblood of the economy is the small-scale entrepreneur, and studying how small businesses work and succeed offers more lessons to people than the billion-dollar-revenue unicorns and massive companies that capture attention. In his new book, The Soul of an Entrepreneur

printing history

A Doonesbury Stereotype

Regular readers may recall that I mentioned several months ago I had acquired a flong of Doonesbury comics from the 1970s. I have an article in preparation at a magazine about some of the interesting details associated with the particular strips, some of which never ran in print, but were preserved by someone who grabbed the sheet from a newspaper that received it before the syndicate sent out replacements. I don’t want to give too much away, as the article has a lot to say on the topic, including insight from a special source.

You can read my magnum opus on flong, a kind of paper mold also known as a “mat,” as in short for “matrix.” I find a lot of references to “ad mats” in particular, as flongs were used by advertisers in the same way that photostats and “slicks” were sent out

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Amy Redmond and Jenny Wilkson (The Tiny Typecast)

One of the heavily used presses at the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle

In this installment of the Tiny Typecast, I speak with artists, designers, and educators Amy Redmond and Jenny Wilkson, who work primarily in letterpress. Jenny founded the letterpress program at the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle, Washington, and Amy studied typecasting, typesetting, and letterpress printing in an apprenticeship with Chris Stern and Jules Faye.

The vibrant local community of printers keep traditions alive while also stoking the fires of a new generation and trying new kinds of printing, mixing different techniques onto the press, and new methods of making material for press, like laser cutters.

This episode was recorded before the pandemic. Letterpress will rise again, just as it has before.

Amy Redmond and Jenny Wilkson

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Delays and Books

The pandemic affects everything, of course, including my little project. We were on the verge of finishing and packing everything to ship out our first 70-odd museum orders—every Kickstarter reward and pre-order placed through about November 2019—when Seattle largely shut down. Anna can’t use the school-connected woodworking shop she’s relied on, though only one small insert of the museum is left to produce. There’s the related matter of whether anyone wants to receive a package from Seattle at this precise moment, too, the answer to which we’re punting forward a bit.

Anna may have access in the near future to a private shop, and may be able to finish the last tiny portion. The first batch of museum cases, more than 2/3rds of the edition planned, is otherwise finished, including anti-skid archival-quality feet, drawer handles, and all the finish needed (sanding, fuming for

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Final Museum Case Details

Last week, I spent a couple of days working alongside Anna Peterson (née Robinson), the woodworking maven who designed and has built the museum cases for the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule. We started with a loose idea, worked through a prototype, then refined into the production design. She took a large skillset and expanded it, learning and consulting with teachers and mentors both in her certificate program in cabinetry (which she finishes this month) and at the Pratt Fine Arts Center, which has an active woodshop where Anna did most of the production and assembly work.

After cases were assembled, there was still sanding, fuming (exposure to ammonia to darken the white oak of the case), oiling, and waxing. Then attaching feet and drawer handles, and building a “book sled,” a unique approach to integrating the book Six Centuries of Type & Printing directly into the each museum.

printing history

Keith Houston on His Book, The Book (The Tiny Typecast)

Author Keith Houston, this episode’s guest

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.

Keith Houston, Author of The Book (The Tiny Typecast)

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Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts or through your favorite podcasting app via its directory or this podcast URL.

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