London has long been a place where type design and graphic design coalesced, and where the machinery of making fonts and the people with an eye to create them intermingled. This book captures a slice of both the contemporary part of it and its history, especially regarding type designer Berthold Wolpe.
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Folks, thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support! What started as a lark to go to London became a journalism and art project, and with your backing I can now make something great. I’ve lined up many visits and am working through people’s schedules and plotting locations on a map of London. (Were you aware…it’s big?)
I’ve set up a pre-order page if you want to let anyone else know about the project before it ships in January and February 2018. The shipping price is slightly higher than during the Kickstarter campaign, as I wanted to give a break to those who came in early to support it.
I have some big thumbtacks on key visits: to St Bride Foundation, to The Type Archive, and to Monotype’s offices, intermingled with about 15 people I am stages of planning from a day and time set to looser plans to tighten up as it gets closer. Some folks I’ve emailed or contacted through intermediaries, and I’m working out those details. It’ll be much more than I listed even in the campaign, but I want to wait until those parts materialize before I announce them.
I’m bringing digital audio recording equipment with me, and I’m hoping to do sit-downs of about 10 to 15 minutes with everyone I meet. I want to have more informal conversations with them, and a podcast-style interview, however relaxed, is more formal. But I’m hoping to share all that with you as well.
This last Saturday, I taught a workshop on laser cutting and letterpress, and in the perfect intersection, I engraved a sample of Albertus Nova, a revival of Berthold Wolpe’s Albertus designed by Toshi Omagari at Monotype, and then printed it. It felt just right.
Thanks again!
—Glenn
Hello, everyone,
A comprehensive article I wrote about the Monotype revival of five Berthold Wolpe typefaces went up yesterday at Creative Pro. This Monotype release was the inspiration for this short book I’m writing and a nugget of what will be in the book about Wolpe and his fonts.
I’m so very pleased with how this campaign is going, and I’ve been nailing down interviews, site visits, and other get-togethers for my London trip. You can see in the campaign description that I’ve added a few more items to my list of who I’ll meet and what I’ll see.
At the current path of funding, it’s possible that I’ll be able to print the book with a method other than digital printing—without everything in place and knowing the total number I need to print, I can’t yet commit publicly. I’ll tell you all when I have more ducks in a row, but it would be very cool.
In my preparation for this trip, I’ve discovered is that many important institutions in England that preserve the history and records of printing and type are extremely underfunded, and rely on the loving care and effort of a network of volunteers struggling to keep access available while also making sure the collections remain in good condition. Part of my book will now clearly be trying to spread the word about the need for more funds for these invaluable archives!
Related, I’m just back from the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum’s annual printer/designer confab (a “wayzgoose”) in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, right on the banks of Lake Michigan. Hamilton preserves a large portion of the memory of wood-type production in America—the company cornered the market for about a century—and has acquired some incredible collections of wood type and wood blocks, including giant circus billboard blocks!
If you're ever traveling near Milwaukee or Green Bay and can spare a day, I highly recommend a visit—it’s about a two-hour drive from both cities. (Photos below.)
Thank you!
—Glenn
Quick note—several people asked about how to get more than one copy of the printed book. I've added a slightly higher reward level, “Triple Kerned,” that includes three printed books and licenses for three ebooks, so you can give ebooks away to others as easily as the books! You can adjust your pledge if you were interested in getting more than one copy at a significant discount.
—Glenn
Goodness, but you all are wonderful! Thank you for putting me over my target goal so quickly! I’m about to book tickets to London, and I’ve been exchanging piles of email with people I plan to meet and institutions and collections to visits. I can’t thank you enough for coming along with me on this (and other journeys) and helping me reshape my career into these explorations.
With additional backing coming in over the next 13 days for this project, I’ll need to print more books to meet backers’ reward fulfillment, but the more books I need to print, the less expensive each is, which gives me the opportunity to upgrade features and even methods—if I raise enough funds, I could shift to offset, but I have some other ideas, too. (Digital printing is inexpensive to start with for short runs, but the more copies you need to print, offset becomes more and more feasible: digital printing has very low setup costs, but high per-unit ones, and offset is the opposite.)
I’ll be at the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, this weekend for its annual “Wayzgoose,” a tradition that dates back at least a couple hundred years (and typically celebrated weeks earlier) marking the end of a season in the shop and the start of using candles by which to set type and print. The Hamilton Wayzgoose is a joyous gathering of letterpress practitioners of all ages, and it’s my first time attending. Watch for photos on my Instagram or Twitter timelines.
Thank you again!
—Glenn