I've always been obsessed with books and reading; I have no memory of a time when I could not read, or was not reading. Just before college (1980), I became interested in typography, and in graduate school (1984) started collecting manual typewriters. Still, somehow it took me a quarter of a century to realize that all along this was just another aspect of my desire to merge art and technology. This really started to come together in 2008 with the acquisition of my first two Linotypes and the realization that art and technology join most concisely in the creation of physical printing types.
This present page lays out many of the ways in which words may be created as physical things. I'd like to explore all of them, but never will - there are too many. The primary set of Notebooks here is " The Circuitous Root Typefoundry and Press," which investigates "hot metal" typecasting and printing. I'll also include in another set of Notebooks as much as I can find about Graphotypes (and Addressographs). Other Notebooks will follow as they happen.
There is no perfect classification for all of this. I'll start out with four major, but quite arbitrary, divisions of the subject:
Of course, the last of these divisions violates the very organizing principles of this section: making words as physical things. Word-making is just too basic to humanity; everything slides into everything else.
1.1.1 - Relief Printing Involving Casting Metal Type
The CircuitousRoot Typefoundry and Press
Researching, Practicing & Documenting Type-Making & Hot Metal Printing.
The Linotype & Intertype composing linecasters, the Ludlow noncomposing linecaster, the Elrod stripcaster, punchcutting, matrix engraving, typefounding, letterpress printing, &c.
1.1.2 - Relief Printing Involving Cold-Forming Metal Type
The Graphotype and Addressograph
[NOT ONLINE YET] The Graphotype is a cold-metal print-embossing machine which produces relief type on a metal plate. The type-plates so produced can then be printed on the Addressograph machine.
1.1.3 - Relief Printing with Nonmetallic Type and Plates
Molded Plate and Stamp Making
[NOT DONE] [The EVA-PRESS.] [Rubber Type Sets (Toy, Signmaking)]
Note that companies making equipment for stereotype plate making and electrotype plate making often crossed over into rubber plate making. Example: Ostrander-Seymour.)
Note also that the process of making rubber stamps/plates often involved casting type (which was used to make the matrix from which the stamp/plate was molded). The Ludlow Typograph in particular was popular for this.
Cut Plate Making
This is perhaps the oldest process, as it encompasses woodcut making and the later methods of wood engraving. It also covers modern linoleum block cutting (and even potato cutting, as far as that goes). However, for now, all that I have here is material on one commercial system for rubber plate cutting, that of the Ti-Pi Company.
1.1.4 - Relief Printing with Media Other than Ink
Note: See also Foil Stamping, below. Foil stamping was often done by printers, but is really, it seems, more a lettering process than a printing process.
1.1.5 - Relief Printing Processes Not Discussed:
Note: In theory when (or if) I get around to looking into the various 19th century photomechanical "process" illustration technologies they should go here. They might just end up in the CircuitousRoot Typefoundry and Press, though. Electrotyping (or at least a placeholder for it) is already there.
Phototypesetting
A very few phototypesetting resources, encountered randomly. [NOT DONE] [Photographs of a FOTOTYPE composing stick and scans of a few FOTOTYPE-ette booklets.] [Varityper Headliner Model 840 Operating Instructions.]
Lithography
A very few lithography resources, encountered randomly. [NOT DONE] [Multilith literature]
(Note: These are machines used for printing complete, finished items (such as address labels, whole pages, or individual works of art) all at once from prepared stencils or masks. For stencil machines intended for making stencils for later use by cutting letters one at a time (such as the Diagraph), see " Stencil Cutting Machines" in " Lettering by Machine," below.)
Diazo
Also known as "whiteprint" and "blue-line" printing. This is known primarily as a technique for reproducing engineering drawings, but there were office-environment general printing systems which used it (e.g., the Bruning "Copyflex"). This is a masking process.
Elliott Addressing Machine
[NOT DONE] A stencil process addressing system.
Mimeograph
[NOT DONE] Mimeograph Stencil Duplicator (But for a good site on using stencil duplicators to make comic and art books, see Sarah Morean's Make Better Books (http://makebetterbooks.com/ )
1.5.1 - Inkjet Printing Processes Not Discussed:
(Well, I'm not going to cover any of them, save only to note that "giclée" is nothing more than a fancy term for inkjet.)
2.1 - Machines Using Relief Type
(Arguably, typewriters and (especially) teletypes ought to be classified under printing rather than lettering. But they both are, or originated as, machines which involved keyboarding input, and keyboarding is a mechanization of writing. Moreover, when a printing process produces multiple copies, each is (or should be) visually identical. When multiple Teletypes produce the same copy, each contains the same information, but each may be in a very different visual form. It is all a bit arbitrary, though.)
Teletypes
[NOT DONE] This is a link "up and over" to Telegraphy, the second division of which concerns Teletypes. That section concerns Teletypes generally and (for the most part) 5-level tape systems specifically. For 6-level tape and related systems, see the Teletypesetter material in "Tape and Remote Control of Linecasters". I don't do much with 8-level tape Teletypes.
Foil Stamping
[NOT ONLINE YET] The Namograph (foil stamping on cylindrical pen bodies, ca. 1920).
[NOTE: There is really very little here. There are many more foil stamping machines and aspects of these processes.]
2.2 - Machines Using Traced Templates
The Varigraph
[NOT DONE] [from Madison, WI!] See ad, Graphic Arts Monthly Vol. 25, No. 9 (Sept., 1953): 121. A template-driven movable pantograph. [scan material; photograph examples]
Pointed Pen Writing Systems
[NOT DONE] Johnston's Twentieth Century reinvention of broad-nib pen "calligraphy," while admirable, has completely obscured the fact that this was not how people wrote with the pen for the several hundred years before the typewriter keyboard displaced it. [The Palmer Method.] [Bibliography for Spencer and for Ziller.]
The Ruling Pen
[NOT DONE] A basic tool of the Drafter and of the Advertising Letterer through the early Twentieth Century.
Other Writing & Lettering Machines, Tools, and Processes Not Discussed:
The methods of writing are innumerable. In the list above, it's pretty obvious, for example, that I failed to cover the broad-tipped dip pen (post-Johnston "calligraphy"), the brush (the primary writing tool in much of the far East), or stonecutting (the basic influence on Western capital letters) - but did you notice that I failed to mention neon tubes?
Essays on Digital Typography and Lettering
[NOT DONE] On Leading and "Kerning" in Digital Type, and the Enthusiastic Abandonment of Understanding.
Paper-handling other than printing/lettering intended for use in an office environment.
Regular commercial printing (letterpress and beyond) of course includes all kinds of cutting, folding, binding, and related machines. I don't have much of this, or even much documentation on it. When I do, that will go in the CircuitousRoot Typefoundry and Press.
However, there were (and are) also many similar machines for cutting, folding, binding, labeling, stapling, stamping, etc. designed for use in the office rather than the printing plant. I don't have any kind of comprehensive collection of these, or even of their documentation. They're all fun, though (office supplies are almost as much fun as art supplies). To the limited extent that I do run across them (or have friends who are willing to share information on theirs) they'll go here. Examples [NONE DONE YET]:
Categories break down, of course. Many machines which logically ought to be considered in an office context are actually covered elsewhere (e.g., the Typewriter itself, the Elliott Labelling Machine, the Mimeograph, etc.) because I think of them primarily as printing or lettering machines.
Southward, Powell, and Joyner's Practical Printing (1911), from which the page icon of a piece of type is taken, is in the public domain.
The cartoon of neolithic machine word-making is from The Inland Printer Vol. 134, No. 1 (October, 1954): 70. The copyright for this issue of The Inland Printer was not renewed as would then have been required. I believe that it therefore passed into the public domain upon the expiration of its original copyright in 1982.
All portions of this document not noted otherwise are Copyright © 2006-2010 by David M. MacMillan and Rollande Krandall.
Circuitous Root is a Registered Trademark of David M. MacMillan and Rollande Krandall.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons "Attribution - ShareAlike" license. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ for its terms.
Presented originally by Circuitous Root®
Select Resolution: 0 [other resolutions temporarily disabled due to lack of disk space]
