RIT Cary Graphic Arts Hebrew Wood Type Collection. (Amelia Hugill-Fontanel)
Sat., Nov. 7 | Shani Avni’s talk on Hebrew wood type was filled with so much interesting information that I realized while going through my many pages of notes that there is no way to recap everything. Avni is currently undertaking the cataloging of around 40 fonts of Hebrew wood type in the Cary Graphic Arts Collection at R.I.T. These fonts were acquired in 2014 from the artist Richard Rockford. [Read more]
Frederic W. Goudy’s many interpretations of the ampersand’s design through history. Original printing form, ca. 1946, with a modern print. (RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection)
“What in Sam Hill is an Ampersand?” asked Frederic W. Goudy in The Typophiles 1936 Christmas keepsake titled Diggings from Many Ampersandhogs. The Typophiles, founded in 1930, brought together typographers, designers, and printers. The organization published many important books on the history and practice of the typographic craft, some of them scholarly, some playful. [Read more]
The completed press, named the Uncommon Press, at the Cary Graphic Arts Collection at RIT. (Photos by Seth Gottlieb except where noted)
This is the sixth and final post in a series that began last year.
Building a wooden printing press takes more than physical means. It requires a great deal of patience and humility. Of course, it also takes tremendous hubris to complete one within a single calendar year. The project would be completed on time and under budget, we told ourselves. There was no other option. [Read more]
The partially constructed Uncommon Press at RIT, soon to be housed at the Cary Graphic Arts Collection.
This is the fifth in a series of posts that will appear throughout the year.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that building a wooden common press is a massive undertaking in more ways than one. Literally, a common press is huge, standing over six feet tall and weighing a few hundred pounds. But, it’s everything that goes into actually constructing a press that really adds up. [Read more]
The platen and hose of the James Franklin Press in Newport, RI.
This is the fourth in a series of posts that will appear throughout the year.
The term “wooden common press” is fairly self-explanatory. It is a press, and it is made of wood. Before the invention of the iron hand press, all presses were common presses, and all of them were wooden. Since January, my teammates and I at Rochester Institute of Technology have been designing an eighteenth-century wooden common press. What proved to be one of our greatest challenges—and one of our favorite adventures—was the search for wood from which to build the press. [Read more]
The Robert Luist Fowle Press with teammates (from left to right) Daniel Krull, Randall Paulhamus, and Seth Gottlieb at the Exeter Historical Society.
This is the third in a series of posts that will appear throughout the year.
The process of researching wooden common presses for the sake of building a historically accurate reconstruction is an intensive one, to say the least. While most college students would have spent their Spring Breaks relaxing and goofing off, some of my teammates and I spent our break traveling through New England visiting printing presses. That’s not to say the trip wasn’t fun, but it was intense. We saw four presses in as many days and as many states. Three were original presses from the early eighteenth century (or possibly the late seventeenth, because the provenance of some isn’t clear), and one was a reconstruction made in 1950 from a design by Ralph Green, an engineer and amateur historian of printing presses. [Read more]
The Louis Roy Press at the Mackenzie Printery and Newspaper Museum
This is the second in a series of posts that will appear throughout the year.
When designing a wooden common press, there’s only so much information available in print. Printer’s manuals, like Caleb Stower’s 1808 manual, The Printer’s Grammar, describe the parts of a printing press, but not so thoroughly as to provide all dimensions. These manuals are useful, but nothing beats being able to measure the real deal. Our team was fortunate enough to visit the Mackenzie Printery and Newspaper Museum in Queenston, Ontario on February 20th to examine and measure the Louis Roy Press held there. Roy was the first King’s printer in Upper Canada and printed the Upper Canada Gazette, beginning in 1793. [Read more]
Illustrations from Mechanick Exercises of English (left) and Blaeu (right) style presses.
This is the first in a series of posts that will continue throughout the year.
Beginning in late January and continuing through the middle of December, a group of four students at the Rochester Institute of Technology will be designing and building a wooden common printing press to be installed in the Cary Graphic Arts Collection there. The team consists of myself, Seth Gottlieb, Ferris Nicolais and Randall Paulhamus, all Mechanical Engineering majors, and Veronica Hebbard, an Industrial and Systems Engineering major. [Read more]
Entrance to the Vignelli Center. (All photos Keelin Burrows)
Tour of the Vignelli Center for Design Studies Rochester Institute of Technology
1 pm friday, october 23
Located on the RIT campus, the Vignelli Center for Design Studies, is the repository for the archives of husband and wife design team, Massimo and Lella Vignelli. Opened in 2010, the center serves as an exhibition and study space available to students and the general public. The collection largely came to the university due to the efforts of Roger Remington, the Massimo and Lella Vignelli Distinguished Professor of Design at RIT, who honored the Vignellis’ wish to have their collection displayed and used as a teaching tool. [Read more]
Jerry Kelly addresses the audience at RIT, showing a photo of Hermann Zapf teaching at RIT ca. 1979. (Emily Hancock)
The Frederic W. Goudy Award for Excellence in Typography was presented to Jerry Kelly on October 24, 2015 as the closing event of the APHA conference at RIT. The Goudy Award is a tradition that is co-sponsored by the Cary Graphic Arts Collection and the RIT School of Media Sciences that honors outstanding practitioners in type design and its related fields. The first Goudy laureate in 1969 was Professor Hermann Zapf, (1918–2015), who later taught at RIT in the 1970s and 80s. It was fitting that the latest Goudy Award should go to one of Zapf’s most successful students, Jerry Kelly, a leading calligrapher, book designer, type designer, and typographer who practices out of New York City. [Read more]
