The Tiny Typecast

We talk about indexes with the author of the book Index, a History of the, Dennis Duncan, and its indexer, Paula Clarke Bain. Modern indexes date back eight centuries, and Dennis’s book takes us from the beginning to the present. Paula has worked for over 15 years as a professional indexer and produced nearly 900 indexes. She explains her working methods and the value of an index to the reader—and as an element of a book’s appeal.

This episode is sponsored by my book Six Centuries of Type & Printing. Find out more about the book and read an excerpt.

Dennis is a writer, translator, and lecturer in English at University College London, and the author also of Book Parts. He has appeared in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books.

Paula is an indexer, copy editor, and proofreader. She has performed her indexing work on books covering such varied topics as Winston Churchill, Fry and Laurie, horror movies, Ted Hughes, musical modernism, the Peterloo Massacre, pigs in America, and the history of the vampire.

Show notes:

Dennis on Twitter

Paula’s website and on Twitter

Purchase Index, a History of the

The Society of Indexers, through which Paula trained for her career

Monograph on Walt Whitman as a printer

“A Font of Type”

Peter Schoeffer’s sales catalog noting an index

Paula’s index in the book Soupy Twists! about the careers of Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, separately and together

Reading the Reprintings, my essay on how a book appears across printings within editions

An essay by scholars of the Lord of the Rings series on the authoritative version of the 50th anniversary editions

The indexical novel by Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

Kurt Vonnegut’s indexers on a plane in Cat’s Cradle

Paula’s index-minded review of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi

Electrotyping was the 3D printing of its day. An electro-chemical process that deposited dissolved copper or other metals onto a prepared object, it effectively allowed creating exact duplicates of a page of type to create a durable printing plate, or to produce a mold (a “matrix”) from type punches or existing pieces of type. This allowed foundries to expand typeface production dramatically, allowing far easier creation of the master forms from which matrices were made—and enabled piracy.

In this episode of the Tiny Typecast, there’s no interview—just me reading a chapter on electrotyping, “A 19th Century 3D Printer,” from my book Six Centuries of Type & Printing. I picked this chapter as I am currently raising funds related to electrotyping on Kickstarter: I have an active campaign through 18 November 2021 to underwrite creating a detailed digital 3D model of a Monotype Electro Display Matrix, a mold created by that company in the early part of the 20th century to allow rapid casting of metal type for handsetting. Rewards include the digital file, a 3D-printed matrix, and historic Monotype matrices. Six months after the digital file is delivered to backers, I’ll re-license it broadly and distribute it widely to help preserve cultural and technological knowledge.

Phil Abel is a letterpress printer in London, who started his Hand and Eye Press in 1985 with a modest array of printing gear on the road towards his current set up with Heidelberg presses, and the ability to use both metal and wood type and produce modern photopolymer plates in house. He produces limited-edition fine-art books and we’ll talk about the album business.

Nick Gill worked for Phil, and eventually acquired his Monotype hot-metal casting gear to form Effra Press in North Yorkshire, England, where he and his wife are raising their children. Effra is one of the few remaining typefounders in the world. Nick trained at the Type Archive’s Monotype Hot-Metal Ltd operation, learning how to cut Monotype punches and matrices from Parminder Kumar Rajput, the only person ever learned all the jobs in the plant at the Monotype factory. Nick is also a musician, which we’ll get into how print and music meet in modern times.

Notes for this episode:

The Type Archive

Six Centuries of Type & Printing by yours truly, composed by Nick and printed by Phil

Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Wind in the Willows editions from Hand and Eye

London Docklands

C.C. Stern Type Foundry visit

The C.C. Stern Type Foundry

Frank Romano and the Museum of Printing in Massachusetts

Martin Zaltz Auswick, the link between Nick and myself, and Helen Zaltzman and her podcast, The Allusionist

Pneumatic aspects of Monotype casting system

Bill Welliver’s CompCAT system installed at Hand and Eye, back in 2013

Kumar & the Lost Art of Punchcutting

Richard Ardagh, New North Press

Sue Shaw obituary

“The Vinyl? It’s Pricey. The Sound? Otherworldly. The Electric Recording Co. in London cuts albums the way they were made in the 1950s and ’60s — literally.”

Daniel Schneider (Instagram: rustedrebar) is a letterpress printer with an undergraduate degree in journalism and a master’s in industrial archeology, a field I am dying to talk to him about. His research has centered on the transformation of nineteenth century artisanal skills within the context of industrialization. He is the Headquarters Manager for the Society for Industrial Archeology at the Michigan Technological University, which is where he earned his master’s.

We discussed his master’s work “excavating” the function of a wood-border stamping machine at the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum and, more generally, how we retain and recover industrial knowledge to understand how things worked in the past. Daniel’s work considers the worker’s role in industrial production, considering the transition of work from craft to repetitive low-skill production.

Notes on this episode:

“Worker Skill in the Industrial Production of Decorative Wood Type Borders”

The Museum of Jurassic Technology

Memory as an aberration in nature: “Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter”

The Tiny Typecase episode with Jim Moran, Master Printer and Collections Officer at the Hamilton Museum

The episode with David Shields, chair of the Department of Graphic Design at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond

Louis John Pouchée’s remarkable stereotyped large ornamental capitals

William H. Page, a major wood-type maker bought out (as most were) by Hamilton

The Barth type caster

Rob Roy Kelly’s American Wood Type (reproduction edition produced by David Shields)

Lake copper district in Keweenaw Peninsula

Steam-stamp mill

Monotype Hot-Metal Ltd., part of The Type Archive in London

Theo Rehak and his now-rare book Practical Typecasting

American Type Founders

Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises

History of the Hitchcock Chair Company

The Hitchcock Chair: the Story of a Connecticut Yankee (1971) by John Tarrant Kenney, who rebuilt the Hitchcock factory and resumed production over a century later

Ancient knapped flint tools created by early hominids

Movie about Andy Goldsworthy, Rivers and Tides

Grendl Löfkvist is a calligrapher, letterpress printer, and former offset press operator, and the education director at Letterform Archive in San Francisco, California. She teaches extensively, including at the City College of San Francisco, at the San Francisco Center for the Book, in the Type West postgraduate certificate program, and at typographic events all over. Her areas of expertise include the history of graphic design, book arts, typography, and letterpress.

This episode “sponsored” by Six Centuries of Type & Printing! Get a discount off your purchase of the book by listening to this episode’s introduction for a coupon code.

Some photos from the class I took with Grendl and Paul Shaw at the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum’s 2019 Wayzgoose and some general photos from that event

Inkworks Press Collective

AB Dick 360 press

Black Sheep Press

Jon Winston

My hometown of Eugene, Oregon, was described in 1984 by the Wall Street Journal as the “last refuge of the terminally hip”

An example of a “direct imaging” or DI press

Linotype 330

(when I said “guns” I was referring to Grendl’s biceps)

Offset printing process

Visions of Peace and Justice (Inkworks Press, 2007)

Adobe slowly retiring PostScript Type 1 support

Grendl on Toshi Omagari’s Sachsenwald (Toshi appeared on the Tiny Typecast in May 2021)

Grendl on David Jonathan Ross’s Clavichord

Nazis and their embrace and rejection of Fraktur, the German black-letter style (Handelsblatt)

Fraktur and its modern use by white nationalists and fascists (99% Invisible)

The Torah must be written with the blackest ink

My interview with Erik Spiekermann about his digital letterpress approach

Stonecutter and lettercutter Nick Benson’s Instagram account

Amelia Hugill-Fontanel, the Associate Curator in the Cary Collection at the Rochester Institute of Technology, discusses the history of the collection, the nature of preserving the past, and the rapid development of printing—especially how quickly reproduction sped up—across the early part of the 19th century.

She’s held her position at RIT since 2009, and her time working with collection dates back a further decade. She’s an active artist and letterpress printer. She manages the Cary Collection’s extensive set of historical presses and type, which are used actively in teaching and research, and also lectures extensively printing history and practice. Amelia is the vice president of programs at the American Printing History Association.

Notes from This Episode:

Cary Collection at RIT

RIT’s Digital Collections, which includes holdings from the Cary Collection

George Eastman Museum

Dr. Therese Mulligan, chair of school of photo at RIT

Kodak Center for Creative Imaging (and the controversy behind it, only in part)

London’s St Bride Printing Library

Letter from the FBI to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Robert Bringhurst’s short book on Arrighi, The Typographic Legacy Of Ludovico Degli Arrighi

RIT students discovered palimpsest on manuscript page

A Collation of Facts Related to Fast Typesetting

The iron hand press

Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises: The Doctrine Of Handy Works Applied To The Art Of Printing

Stanhope didn’t patent his press

“Flong Time, No See,” my monograph on flongs and stereotypes

Ed Folsom’s monograph “Whitman Making Books/Books Making Whitman: A Catalog and Commentary”

Making Printer’s Type by Rich Hopkins

Stephen O. Saxe, who bequeathed his collection to RIT

Alix Christie wrote the book on Gutenberg. Her novel, Gutenberg’s Apprentice, puts us squarely in the milieu in which Gutenberg formed his studio, told through the eyes of his apprentice Peter Schöffer, also a historical figure. Alix’s non-fiction work includes reporting across decades as a domestic and foreign correspondent for a host of publications, including the Washington Post and the Guardian. She’s also a letterpress printer, who received her training in her youth from her grandfather, Lester Lloyd.

We talk about Gutenberg, the history and “invention” of printing, the Grabhorn Institute (the non-profit preserving Mackenzie & Harris Type and the Arion Press), learning letterpress as a youth, and much more.

Steve Finan is journalist who writes regularly about language and the misunderstandings that result every time we open our mouths. His column “Oh My Word” appears in The Courier of Dundee, Scotland, and other DC Thomson publications, where he is the heritage unit editor. He's the author of several books about football—that's proper football not the American kind—including Lifted over the Turnstiles, described as "the best book about old Scottish football grounds ever published."

Steve began as a printing apprentice in just under the last four years of hot-metal typesetting and relief letterpress printing at a newspaper in Scotland. He loved the sound, the smell, the pranks, the robust work of it all. He reminisces about his work in those days, and tells stories best known to printer’s devils and those who labored on the stone.

Toshi Omagari studied Visual Communication Design at Musashino Art University, Japan, and then got his master's in Typeface Design at the University of Reading in England. From 2012 to 2020, he worked at Monotype, one of the leading digital type foundries, with roots that date back well over a century. During that time, he created his own faces and revivals, including a major reworking and expansion of five typefaces created by Berthold Wolpe. Toshi runs his own font studio now, and lectures and teaches.

His 2019 book, Arcade Game Typography (find it at a bookstore), is an incredible deep dive into the 8-by-8 pixel fonts used in early video game systems and arcade consoles. He also writes exhaustively about type-related issues, such as this recent blog entry about ink traps and light traps.

David Shields is the preeminent expert on the history of wood type, and currently the chair of the Department of Graphic Design at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where he teaches design. David previously taught at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was the Design Custodian of the Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection. David has engaged in extensive studies of the history of wood type production in America and Europe, as well as actively using historical type in printing. He produced the reproduction edition of American Wood Type: 1828–1900.

His work provides an invaluable tool to historian and to printers, by helping people track down the provenance of type and re-assemble sets of type that have been scattered. By educating people about historic wood type, he makes it more likely that it will continue to be cherished, retained, studied, and used. David is also always looking for the people behind the type. David’s research has helped him identify the people who worked in many wood-type companies, and even tie particular workers to fonts of type.