Observations

“Typeface” documentary on Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum

Director Justine Nagan is now putting the finishing touches on Typeface, a feature-length documentary film about the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum. The film is a production of Chicago-based Kartemquin FIlms (of Hoop Dreams fame).

I designed and printed a poster last year (pictured above) to promote the film and help raise money for the production; I’ve also done some advising on rough edits of the film. Justine and the team working on the documentary are dedicated and skilled filmmakers (not to mention great all-around people), and the edits I’ve seen so far are very promising. After having spent much time at Hamilton, I anxiously look forward to a broader public release to help spread the word about the museum.

To get info about when and where to see the film (including a screening next week in Atlanta!), buy limited-edition posters, read news updates and info on the project, and more, see the official Typeface site.

Taking Sides: The printed broadside from 1450 to 1830

Detail of a broadside from the Bodleian Library's "Broadside Ballads" archive

Not too far behind the St Bride Library’s Breathing Broadsheets exhibition, another broadside-centric event is being scheduled to take place in the UK this fall. The HoBo website — a “dedicated webspace for History of the Book events and resources throughout the UK” — has announced some preliminary information about another event scheduled for November 14, including a call for papers:

The Centre for the Study of the Book at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford is holding a symposium on the early-modern broadside in the age of its digital reproduction … This symposium will explore how the broadside demarcated or connected both public and private worlds and popular and learned cultures. What is recovered of the broadside and its world through digitization, and what remains to be reconstructed? What is its place in the histories of collecting, literacy, popular culture and antiquarianism?

Abstracts of 200 words describing papers of 25 minutes are invited on any aspect of the world of the broadside, from Gutenberg until the end of the handpress period (c.1830). Send abstracts by July 20 to giles.bergel@merton.ox.ac.uk

Conference organizers: Giles Bergel (Merton College); Alexandra Franklin (Centre for the Study of the Book, Bodleian Library)

While this is event is indeed close in topic, timing, and location to the St Bride exhibition, it clearly has a much more academic scope. Besides, as I always say: the more broadsides, the better.

Bill Moran and Hamilton Wood Type

Prolific design author Steven Heller recently interviewed Bill Moran – a letterpress printer, typography teacher, and co-author of Hamilton Wood Type: A History in Headlines – about the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum for Voice, the AIGA Journal of Design.

In 2004 Bill’s studio, Blinc Publishing, worked with type designer Chank Diesel to publish the BlincType Letterpress Fontpak, a set of fonts inspired by wood type from the Hamilton Museum. The most interesting of these (I think) is an experimental typeface design called Hamilton Offset which translates an interesting print effect called “ghosting”.

From Chank’s description of the project:

While working on a poster project, Bill Moran accidentally offset some reject proofs and came up with an effect that could only come from this strange brew of raw materials of the printing and typesetting crafts. Bill translated the ghosted type from press proof into a digital format. He then converted the digital type to a new wood-carved alphabet. Working on equipment used by his grandfather, he respectfully created a worthy addition to Hamilton’s lineage.

Also see the information on the Blinc site about the project.