Duensing's Syllabus of Typographic Taxonomy
Duensing, Paul Hayden. Proposed Draft for A Syllabus of Typographic Taxonomy. (Vicksburg, MI: The Private Press and Typefoundry of Paul Hayden Duensing, 1980). This work was presented at the second biennial conference of the American Typecasting Fellowship (called the "Second National Conference on Hot-Metal Typecasting and Design" on its cover).
This work is much more important than it might first appear. It is "just" an outline, true. But you can't understand a field until you have an outline of the entire field, and this is the first (and still the most extensive) such outline. It is enlightening especially because it covers every method of type-making without prejudice, including historically important methods now almost always forgotten. By way of contrast, many other treatments of the subject cover only one method and presume that it is the only method.
The digital reprint presented here is one done by CircuitousRoot with the kind permission of Ginger Duensing. The original text is in the public domain (as is this reprint), but Ginger Duensing asks that Paul Hayden Duensing always be identified as the author of this document. Please respect this.
The icon above left links to a presentation of this digital reprint at The Internet Archive, which has versions suitable for reading online. Here are three local versions:
Not only in printing but in the mechanick arts generally technical writing in English starts with Moxon. (But for all that I admire him, do not try to understand a typefounder's hand mold from his illustration!)
See the Bibliography for information on the Davis and Carter edition of Moxon, which you really ought to have.
Moxon. Printing. (1683, 1896 Vol. 1, Columbia)
Moxon, Joseph. Theo. L. DeVinne, ed. Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, Or the Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing . 1683. NY: The Typothetæ of the City of New York, 1896. Volume 1 of 2. This is a local copy of the Google Books digitization of the Columbia University copy of this volume (No. 27 of 450).
Moxon. Printing. (1683, 1896 Vol. 1, Princeton)
Moxon, Joseph. Theo. L. DeVinne, ed. Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, Or the Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing . 1683. NY: The Typothetæ of the City of New York, 1896. Volume 1 of 2. This is a local copy of the Google Books digitization of the Princeton University copy of this volume (No. 166 of 450).
Moxon. Printing. (1683, 1896 Vol. 1, Virginia)
Moxon, Joseph. Theo. L. DeVinne, ed. Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, Or the Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing . 1683. NY: The Typothetæ of the City of New York, 1896. Volume 1 of 2. This is a local copy of the Google Books digitization of the University of Virginia copy of this volume (No. 157 of 450, late of the library of Edward L. Stone, Printer).
Moxon. Printing. (1683, 1896 Vol. 2, Harvard)
Moxon, Joseph. Theo. L. DeVinne, ed. Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, Or the Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing . 1683. NY: The Typothetæ of the City of New York, 1896. Volume 2 of 2. This is a local copy of the Google Books digitization of the Harvard University copy of this volume.
Fournier. Manuel Typographique Tome I. (1764)
Fournier [le jeune], Pierre Simon [aka Simon Pierre]. Manuel Typographique, Tome I. Paris: Imprimé par l'Auteur, M.DCC.LXIV. This is a local copy of the Google Books digitization of the Oxford University copy. See the Bibliography for information on Harry Carter's 1930 translation of Fournier into English, and reprints of it.
Fournier. Manuel Typographique Tome II (1766)
Fournier [le jeune], Pierre Simon [aka Simon Pierre]. Manuel Typographique, Tome II. Paris: Imprimé par l'Auteur, M.DCC.LXVI. Volume 2 of Fournier isn't really about typefounding, but contains showings of his typefaces. This is a local copy of the Google Books digitization.
Loy [Johnston/Saxe Edition]
Between 1898 and 1900 William E. Loy published 28 short biographical sketches of "[American] Designers and Engravers of Type." These have been collected and reprinted in a fine modern edition edited by Alastair M. Johnston and Stephen O. Saxe. The Johnston/Saxe edition also includes specimens of as many types as could be found which were designed by the type-makers in question, and an exceedingly useful list of 19th century type design patents. It is a necessary edition to any typefounder's library.
Loy [original]
Here are the original articles of Loy's series from The Inland Printer in frequently very imperfect digitizations. This is no substitute for the Johnston/Saxe edition.
Legros (1908)
Legros, Lucien A. "Typecasting and Composing Machinery." In 1908 Legros presented this very long paper to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. It's a sort of a warm-up exercise for the definitive Typographical Printing Surfaces that he wrote with J.C. Grant in 1916. His 1908 paper was published initially in the Proceedings [of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers]. 1908, Parts 3-4. London: The Institution of Mechanical Engineers, 1908. Pages 1027-1222. Google Books has digitized the University of Michigan copy; the version here is a local copy of the Google Books digitization. This digitization is of indifferent quality, and several of the plates are incomplete.
Legros (1908, offprint)
Legros, Lucien A. "Typecasting and Composing Machinery." This is the same paper as that in the Proceedings , but excerpted as a separate publication by the Institution. It, too, has been digitized by Google Books (Harvard University copy); the version here is a local copy of that digitization.
Legros & Grant. Typog. Printing Surfaces. (Google)
Legros, Lucien A. and John Cameron Grant. Typographical Printing Surfaces. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1916). A century later, this remains the definitive work on the subject.
The copyright status of this work presents a puzzle. In the US it is in the public domain due to the expiration of all possible US copyright. In the UK, it may or may not be in copyright depending upon the date of the death of John Cameron Grant. Its UK copyright expires 70 years after his death, but his date of death is not known. Google Books has digitized this volume and made it available for full view in the US. They're playing it safe, though, and not releasing it overseas. I, however, am in the US (Google is international) and can legally reprint it to my website (which is also located in the US). The version linked here is, therefore, a local copy of the Google Books digitization (of the University of Michigan copy). Whether you may legally view it if you are outside of the US is entirely up to you to determine.
Legros & Grant. Typog. Printing Surfaces. (CR scan).
Legros, Lucien A. and John Cameron Grant. Typographical Printing Surfaces. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1916). See the previous entry for a note on the curious copyright status of this work. I have myself scanned an original copy of this work and uploaded a reasonably high-resolution version of this scan to The Internet Archive. The link here takes you to that version.
R. Hunter Middleton was the second most important type designer in America in the 20th century, right after Morris Fuller Benton. (Goudy comes in at an honorable third place.) He was, moreover, one of the few type designers to write accurately about more than one method of making type.
See also Middleton's An Essay on the Forgotton Art of the Punchcutter (1965).
Middleton. Chicago Letter Founding
Middleton, R. Hunter. Chicago Letter Founding. (Chicago: The Black Cat Press, 1937.)
This is one of the primary sources for information on Robert Wiebking. "What Edward P. Prince contributed to English private press printing when he engraved the punches for the Kelmscott Press fonts, the Doves Press fonts, and others, Robert Wiebking of Chicago contributed to fine printing in America." (12)
Middleton. Making Printers' Typefaces
Middleton, R. Hunter. Making Printers' Typefaces. (Chicago: The Black Cat Press, 1938.)
This is one of the few volumes by someone who really knew every aspect of what he talked about and talked about more than one method of type-making. His only serious omission is the method of electroforming from pattern types (he mentions one variation of this as being "in vogue" in Europe, but seems unaware of the extensive history of this method in America in the Nineteenth Century).
Although William Addison Dwiggins was merely a designer rather than a maker of type, he enjoyed an unusually close relationship with the makers of matrices at Mergenthaler Linotype Company. His perspective on type design is therefore especially useful.
WAD to RR (1940)
WAD to RR: A Letter about Designing Type . (Cambridge, MA: Harvard College Library, 1940.) This is a letter, revised and edited for publication, from Dwiggins to Rudolph Ruzicka. "G," mentioned in the text, is Chauncey H. Griffith, a typeface designer in his own right but also the vice president in charge of typograhic development for the Mergenthaler Linotype Company.
To save space, this digitization omits several pages blank in the original: the front cover fold-down, the front flyleaf entirely, the verso of the tipped-in drawing, the back flyleaf entirely, and the back cover entirely.
Most people would file these under a "Goudy" section of type designers and artists. I'm a machine geek, though, so I've filed it here with the mechanics of making type. Goudy, who did not believe that a mere mechanic could create type, would have been appalled. Still, Goudy had the gumption to undertake the physical production of type himself, and this sets him apart from those who were only artists and not also artisans.
Note: My scans of Lewis and of Goudy's Half-Century aren't very good - they're just quick scans of library copies done on my office scanner. But these are important works by and about Goudy, and by chance and benign neglect they have passed into the public domain (other important works by Goudy have not). It seemed therefore more important to make them easily available than to fail to do so through lack of time to make them beautiful.
Goudy. Creation of a Printing Type.
[Goudy], and Maurice Kellerman (director). The Creation of a Printing Type: From the Design to the Print by Frederic W. Goudy . "A Paramount Picture presented by Adolph Zukor." 1933.
This shows Goudy at work drawing a letter, tracing the letter, cutting the cardstock pattern for it, engraving the working pattern using an industrial pantograph engraver, engraving the matrix using a Benton-style vertical pantograph engraver (not clearly shown, alas). The matrix is then cast on a Monotype display caster, though it is not clear that Goudy is doing the casting (did he have a caster in his Deepdene studio?) Curiously, while the matrix so engraved and cast is a standard Lanston Monotype display matrix, the matrix shown being placed into an array of matrices afterward is not. Goudy (himself) then prints the type on an iron handpress.
A tiny version of this film is online at: http://www.TypeCulture.org/ Streaming video doesn't work well in all browsers, though. If it helps, the real RTSP address is: rtsp://streaming.typeculture.org/streaming.typeculture.org/Goudy_stream.mov
This film is also available from Carl Schlesinger, 39 Myrtle Street, Rutherford, NJ 07070. In his catalog, Carl calls this film "Type designer in Action". On the DVD itself, he calls it 'Frederick [sic] Goudy "Designing Type"'. It's all the same film.
Finally, this film is also available as one of the "extras" on the DVD of the film Making Faces, about the late Jim Rimmer .
Boone. Type by Goudy. (1942)
Boone, Andrew R. "Type by Goudy." Popular Mechanics. (April, 1942): 114-119.
This is a rather well-done popular article on Goudy's methods for engraving matrices. It has several good photographs and illustrations, including some of the Benton-derived (but not Benton) pantograph engraver used by Goudy and the cutter grinder he used. Drawings of Scripps and Hadriano. This article has been scanned and is online on the " Modern Mechanix" blog. It is also online for full view (but not download) at Google Books (but the images in this presentation are not as good).
Lewis. Behind the Type. (1941)
Lewis, Bernard. Behind the Type: The Life Story of Frederic W. Goudy . Pittsburgh, PA: Department of Printing, Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1941. Also contains "The Ethics and Aesthetics of Type and Typography" by Goudy ("An address delivered at Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, February 12, 1938.")
Contains photographs of Goudy's patterns and of Goudy at his industrial (non-Benton-style) pantograph engraver.
Goudy. A Half-Century. (1946, v. 1)
Goudy, Frederic W. A Half-Century of Type Design and Typography: 1895-1945. Volume 1. (NY: The Typophiles, 1946.) Typophile Chap Books: XIII.
Goudy. A Half-Century. (1946, v. 2)
Goudy, Frederic W. A Half-Century of Type Design and Typography: 1895-1945. Volume 2. (NY: The Typophiles, 1946.) Typophile Chap Books: XIV.
Typologia
Goudy, Frederic. Typologia: Studies in Type Design and Type Making. (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1940.) Reprinted in paperback by the UC Press in 1977.
This book is still in copyright, and indeed still in print, and so is not reprinted here. It is, however, online for full viewing (but not downloading) via Google Books by permission of the University of California Press. Go to the Google Books Advanced Search page at http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search and search for it under its title.
The Building of a Book (1906)
Hitchcock, Frederick H. The Building of a Book. (NY: The Grafton Press, 1906). Linn Boyd Benton wrote the chapter on "The Making of Type," pp. 31-40. It is not illustrated, it is too brief, and it (the chapter, not the book as a whole) describes ATF's method of this period as if it is the only method by which type is made - but it is Benton speaking here for himself, and that makes it worthwhile.
This book has been digitized several times, and copies are available online from The Internet Archive, The Hathi Trust, and Google Books. The link here is to a local copy of the digization of the Univ. of California copy from The Internet Archive. It is to a PDF version. Here's the much nicer DJVU version .
Modern Automatic Type Making Methods (1909)
Kaup, W. J. "Modern Automatic Type Making Methods." American Machinist. Vol. 32 (December 16, 1909): 1042-1046. In addition to the more or less conventional views of the Benton Engraving Machine, Cutter Grinder, and Microscope for cutter inspection, this article shows the Benton Delineator and a matrix-fitting machine.
Type Speaks!. (1948)
ATF. Narrated by Ben Grauer. Type Speaks! Film, 35 minutes, circa 1946 [date by Carl Schlesinger]. N.B. the title is "Type Speaks!", not "The Type Speaks!"
"Excellent section showing operation of Benton punch and matrix cutting machine; how individual type is cast at ATF, designing of typefaces." (description from Carl Schlesinger's catalog). It features Ben Grauer being literate and Warren Chappell drawing Lydian. It shows a little punchcutting and matrix driving, but concentrates on the machine engraving methods in use at ATF. Theo Rehak, in Practical Typecasting, notes that the procedures shown here were those employed at ATF from the period 1941-1948 under wartime pressures of economy. The pantograph engraving machine shown engraving working patterns is a Gorton model 3-B three-dimensional pantograph engraver stripped of some of its 3-D equipment and used here in 2-D work. (It is not a Gorton 3-U, which is a much smaller machine.)
This film is available from Carl Schlesinger, 39 Myrtle Street, Rutherford, NJ 07070.
Practical Typecasting. (1993)
Rehak, Theo. Practical Typecasting. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Books, 1993. Rehak was the last typecaster trained at American Type Founders. He and the type foundry he created, The Dale Guild, have been central in the preservation of what was salvaged from the wreckage of that once great company. Despite its name, Practical Typecasting has much in it on the making of matrices and related processes.
This book is of course in copyright and not reproduced here. It should be in the library of every serious typefounder.
From about 1980 until his untimely passing in 2010, the Canadian printer, artist, and typefounder Jim Rimmer accomplished something quite extraordinary. Not only did he teach himself to make type, and in fact make and cast a number of very good faces, but he shared his knowledge and taught others to do it as well.
He employed a number of different methods. He began by engraving type by hand directly on typemetal blanks to make patrices (pattern types) from which matrices for typecasting were then electroformed. Later he employed pantographs to produce metal working patterns and, from them, patrices for electroforming. Finally, he employed pantographs not only for working patterns but also for the direct engraving of matrices (this is the procedure documented in Kegler's film Making Faces).
The list here highlights only a few of Rimmer's works (and presents a few new ones). For a more complete list, see the ../../ Bibliography, and also the hand-lists and bibliographies in several of the works noted there.
It is one of my great regrets that I became involved in type-making too late to meet him.
Making Faces
Making Faces: Metal Type in the 21st Century. A film by Richard Kegler.
This film is, to me, inspirational. It is a well-produced, semi-technical account of the production of printing type from design through casting. He employed a method derived from Goudy's, using paper master patterns, pantographically engraved typemetal working patterns, and the pantographic engraving of matrices. But as the great Theo Rehak said of Rimmer and this film in his address at the 2010 American Typecasting Fellowship conference in Piqua, Ohio: "Do you understand what this man has done for you? He's smoothed out Goudy." By this I believe that Rehak meant three things: First, Rimmer did it all himself, without the support Goudy enjoyed from his institutional sponsors. In Rimmer we can find all of the necessary steps, not just most of them. Second, Rimmer incorporated digital technology as an intermediate step, making the computer serve metal type. Finally, by allowing his process to be documented extensively, Rimmer gave this complete path to us. He teased the thread of this method out of Goudy and out of his own knowledge of typefounding, smoothed it out for the 21st century, and passed it on to us.
This film is of course in copyright and therefore not reproduced here. It is available from the P22 digital typefoundry, at http://www.p22.com/products/makingfaces.html. If you're seriously interested in pantographic type-making, this will be the best $24.95 you ever spent. The trailer is on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph0ooDzD4ZQ
Pie Tree Press
Rimmer, Jim. Pie Tree Press. Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau Press, 2008.
Rimmer printed his autobiography, Leaves from the Pie Tree as a fine edition of very few copies. From this, Pie Tree Press was derived, with additional material, as a more widely available work. It contains a number of important technical observations on and illustrations of his type-making procedures.
This book is in copyright and not reprinted here. Unfortunately, secondhand copies are becoming scarce.
Letters from Jim Rimmer to Alex Widen
Several letters by Jim Rimmer to Alex Widen. These are amazing. They do presume that you already understand the process, but given that you do this is like having Rimmer sit down beside you and tell you about all of the tricky parts that took him years of effort to learn.
Engraving Type Designs in Lead
Rimmer, Jim. "Engraving Type Designs in Lead." The Devil's Artisan. No. 15 (1984): 14-20. [The table of contents of this issue gives the title as "Engraving Type Designs in Metal," while the article itself says "Lead."] On the hand-engraving (no pantograph) of patrices on typemetal quads for electroforming matrices for Juliana Oldstyle. This is a reprint, with additional comments and with new (and very nice) illustrations of the process, of an article which previously appeared under the title "Original Font Cut in Lead, Matrics [sic] Are Electroformed" in the American Typecasting Fellowship Newsletter, No. 9 (May, 1984): 27-31 .
In Making Faces, Rimmer says that in his previous methods he simply "whacked them [the types] out with a knife." He speaks too modestly. In the procedure he used, he had his large-size artwork transferred at final type body size to "INT" (3-M Image-N-Transfer) dry-transfer media (a Letraset-like product, no longer available, which allowed the making of transfers from artwork; I believe that the film shows actual Letraset transfers here, not Rimmer's INT transfers). He used these to define the letterform on cast typemetal blanks which he then hand-engraved into patrices. These, in turn, were used to electroform matrices. With the exception of the INT transfers, this is the same procedure used to make many of the most elaborate typefaces of the 19th century. There is nothing at all primitive about it; it is basically hand punchcutting in typemetal. The article here, "Engraving Type Designs in Metal," is to the best of my knowledge the only substantial treatment of this method, in English at least. He has some additional comments on this method in Pie Tree Press, as well.
This article is in copyright and not reprinted here.
The Cutting of Cartier in Metal
Rimmer, Jim. "The Cutting of Cartier in Metal." DA [Devil's Artisan], A Journal of the Printing Arts. No. 52 (Spring/Summer 2003): 15-20. Rimmer's own description of his using Goudy's style of cut paper master patterns with a Taylor-Hobson pantograph to cut typemetal working patterns, and then using his Weibking-Ludlow pantograph to engrave patrices for electroforming of matrices. In this case, his first attempt at the cutting of Cartier, he abandoned the project after he discovered that the pantograph's adjustments had shifted during the cutting of the series. Rimmer did later finish the project and cut Cartier in metal.
This article is in copyright and not reprinted here.
Nelson. From Punch to Printing Type. (1985)
Nelson, R. Stan. From Punch to Printing Type: The Art and Craft of Hand Punchcutting and Typecasting . (Videotape) NY: Columbia University School of Library Service, 1985.
Essential. This is still available (in VHS and DVD) both from Carl Schlesinger 39 Myrtle Street, Ruthrford, NJ 07070 and from the Book Arts Press of the Rare Books Schoold of the University of Virginia. Update 2011: now on DVD from Book Arts Press.
Burnette. Out of Sorts. (2009-?)
Burnette was working on this film in the 2009 timeframe. At present (2011) there are video clips of portions of it online on youtube. These show Stan Nelson at work making type. After struggling through the results of multiple generations of video transfers from low-budget films from the 1930s through 1950s, it is SO nice to see modern well-shot film with proper lighting!
Paul Hayden Duensing's Proposed Draft for A Syllabus of Typographic Taxonomy is in the public domain because it was published in the US without copyright notice at a time when such notice was required to secure copyright. This digital reprint remains in the public domain. However, Ginger Duensing requests that Paul Hayden Duensing always be identified as the author of this work.
The texts of Moxon, Fournier, Benton, and Kaup digitized by Google Books and/or available at The Hathi Trust are in the public domain.
Loy's series from The Inland Printer is in the public domain in the original, and the reprints of it here remain in the public domain.
The works of Middleton, Dwiggins, and Goudy which are reprinted here are in the public domain.
All portions of this document not noted otherwise are Copyright © 2011 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/3.0/ for its terms.
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