[TO DO: (1) move sections here from parent directory. (2) reorganize and rethink in light of new work which reproduces specimen books - MUCH crosslinking to punchcutters must happen.]
[TO DO: reprint Goudy's "Half Century of Type Design" (1941), which is now public domain. My scans in typefounding section.
[NOTE TO SELF: In the "History" Notebooks below, work through Lawson's Anatomy of a Typeface and Carter's Twentieth Century Type Designers to try to nail down the details of the types from the point of view of punchcutting, matrix engraving, and making type or matrices.]
Punch and Matrix Makers
[NOT ONLINE YET] Hand punchcutters, machine punchcutters, matrix justifiers, type cutters (for electroforming), electroformers [are any known besides Starr?], pattern engravers, and matrix engravers. These are the people who made the tools which permitted modern media culture, yet to the best of my knowledge as I start this section not even a comprehensive list of them exists. This is just an attempt to piece together such a list.
Castermen
[NOT ONLINE YET] The operators of typecasters are perhaps even less well known than the makers of matrices. Here I'll cover those few who are known (when they were exclusively castermen). Note that "casterman" is a traditional job title adopted for the modern world by those who would preserve this technology and its traditions. It is gender-neutral, despite appearances.
Theo Rehak. Winters [for LATF].
Type Foundries and Matrix Making Operations
[NOT ONLINE YET] For the most part, I'll trace this through the production of physical type only, with perhaps some references to other and later technologies (hand lettering with various tools, lettering and stenciling machines, transfer lettering (Letraset®), phototypesetting, digital, etc.) My ephasis is on late 19th and early 20th century operations.
Type Designers
[NOT ONLINE YET] There are many books on type designers, but for the most part they treat type as a purely two-dimensional pencil-on-paper (or computer screen) artistic exercise. Here, I want to sketch out the links between the designers, their typefaces, and the foundries and punchcutters/matrix-engravers who made the type possible.
Type Scholars and Administrators
[NOT ONLINE YET] There may be no field other than type which has been so strongly influenced by persons who knew all about it but couldn't actually do it themselves. In this field, Henry Lewis Bullen stands above all others. Indeed, he may have invented it.
Note that here you will not find DeVinne (who was a scholar, but also a type designer, so he's in the Type Designers Notebook), but you will find Morrison (also a scholar and a capable impresario, but not, in fact, a type designer).
An Incomplete Typeface Index
[NOT ONLINE YET] When was it made? Who cut it? Who commissioned and produced it? Who designed it? Why was it made: in what context? in response to what? What was its position in relation to similar products of other manufacturers? What were its design sources/antecedents?
Bibliography
[NOT ONLINE YET] For the history and design of typefaces. For the bibiliography of the history of type and matrix making per se, see ../ Making Printing Matrices & Type -> Bibliography. (There is some overlap between the two, of course.)
[Misc references to incorporate. Rogers, Jason. Newspaper Building. 1918. has prices on Monotype, Thompson, stereotyping, etc.
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