Type comes alive this summer as Buffalo plays host to TypeCon2008: Punkt. From the irreverent to the serious, the eclectic to the traditional, and the modern to the historical, SOTA’s tenth conference is a letterfest of talks, workshops, tours, exhibitions, and special events created for type lovers at every level.

TYPECON CONFERENCE
€2 days of optional workshops
€3 days of presentations, panels & discussions
€Gala Party at the Hyatt with Déjà Blü
€Exhibitions, Bookshop, vendor area & Give-aways
€Closing party for attendees at The Roycroft Campus
For Conference attendees only

TYPECON PUBLIC EVENTS
€Pecha Kucha at Hallwalls
Open to the general public ­Free for Conference attendees
€Austrian desinger Stefan Sagmeister at the Karpeles Manuscript Library
Museum
Open to the general public ­Free for Conference attendees
€Dutch design group NLXL at UB
Open to the general public ­Free for Conference attendees
€German design legend Erik Spiekermann at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery
Open to the general public for free
€Music event at Mohawk Place featuring Odiorne & P22 records showcase
Open to the general public ­Free for Conference attendees

€Over 80 presenters & 500 attendees from around the world

One week in Buffalo- It’s big!

Register now, you don’t want to miss this!

http://www.typecon.com

On Wednesday May 21st we are pleased to present our 7th Speakers’ Night.

Dominic Ayre and Rod McDonald will talk about the future of typography in a digital world while Donna Braggins moderates.

]]> http://typeclub.com/2008/05/15/speakers%e2%80%99-night/feed/ http://typeclub.com/2008/05/13/swipe-books/ http://typeclub.com/2008/05/13/swipe-books/#comments Tue, 13 May 2008 18:13:52 +0000 Brian http://typeclub.com/?p=146

As of May 1st, Swipe Books has moved into a beautiful new space at 401 Richmond. The hours and phone numbers are still the same and the ever expanding content is just as rich as ever.

The Type Club is very pleased to be holding two Events inside the bookstore this fall. We hope to see you there and that you take the time to visit the space before our fall program is formally announced.

The Pie Tree Press, his imprint these many years, is named after the tree in his yard that the neighbour’s kids would come and pick apples from for their pies. The Press occupies part of his basement, a hand built addition to the back of his house and a small bindery/studio opposite the entrance to the press room. At the entrance is an alphabet of Jim’s Duensing Titling face carved by him into a printer’s stone. Inside are his presses, casters, cases of type, a machine shop for building and repairing equipment (which he does himself), and a collection of typographic objects. His main printing press is a 14 x 22 Colts Armory Platen that he literally rebuilt by hand with many homemade parts.

1) The Entrance to the Pie Tree Press; 2) Duensing Titling, carved by Jim

3) The Colts Armory Platen Press; 4) The Ogata with the Bindery visible through the window

Jim is remarkable in his approach to type design. He has been lettering for decades and does all of his rough work by hand and then translates them to digital using the Ikarus program. Ikarus is a vector based encoding system introduced in 1973 to deal with digitizing vast film-type libraries and was the first successful tool used by most of the major foundries. The original art is laid out on a graphics tablet and with a digitizing puck – a device similar to a plotting pen, but the puck resembles a mouse with different buttons for specific kinds of points. It sets a variety of control points defining the outlines of straight lines and arcs. There is nothing really new about this part of the process, but Jim takes it a step further by using it as the basis for his metal type design and casting.

1) Stern, the pen drawings; 2) setting the points with the digitizing puck;

3) cleaning up the letters on the screen; 4) preparing the letters for mounting

After outputting the characters on a laser printer, he mounts them on bristol and cuts the forms out to create a 36 pica paper Master Pattern. He then mounts those on a particle board substrate and, using a Taylor Hobson pantograph router, he reduces them incrementally; first to an 18 pica lead Working Pattern at half the original size and finally scaling it to a brass Matrix on the more modern Ogata RS-260 Pantograph at the appropriate point size – 16 point, in the case of Stern. The Matrix cutting is tricky as the shoulders need to be cut away enough that the cast type will be able to be removed easily from the Matrix. Also, the depth must be precise to create type that is the appropriate height (0.918″), so measurements are done by the thousandth of an inch with less than .0005″ leeway.

1) Jim making the Working pattern on the Taylor Hobson; 2) reducing from the Working pattern on the Ogata

3) the paper Master in comparison to the lead Working pattern; 4) a collection of brass Matrices for his Duensing Titling

Frederic Goudy used the Deckel Engraver (similiar to the Benton pantograph, the first matrix-engraving machine designed by Linn Boyd Benton in 1884) to the same effect in creating typefaces for his own Village Type Foundry. Goudy preferred the control of working from his own drawings, rather than having the staff at Lanston Monotype interpret them for him. A 1930s video can be found here. This is a faster process than punch-cutting and allows for a greater deal of scalability. Multiple sizes can be created from the same Master patterns, though both an intuitive sense and an educated understanding of the translation of the characters to the different sizes is needed to accurately interpret the subtleties in the cutting process. Jim is quite adept at this by now. He has also done some punch-cutting, but finds the pantograph process better suited to his needs.

After the matrices are all made, Jim casts his type. He has three Monotype casters; a Thompson Caster, a Super Caster, and a Composition Caster which works with his Monotype Keyboard. For his upcoming book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, he designed an 18 pt face called Hannibal and rigged the mat to fit within the confines of Garamond and was able to key in the text on the Monotype Keyboard and cast it on the Composition Caster.

1) Thompson Caster; 2) Super Caster;

3) Monotype Keyboard; 4) Composition Caster; 5) Hannibal matrices in a Garamond layout

Despite the mechanical aids, this is still a time consuming manual process, so output is limited. Regardless of the time involved, designing the faces, making the patterns and matrices, casting and setting the type, proofing and printing the pages, collating and binding the books, and tipping in the illustrations, Jim’s output has been quite prolific for a one man operation. Working to metal is very different from working direct to digital, and, in doing so, Jim has managed to cross-over a century of printing technology using digital as an intermediate step. Both the quantity and the quality of his work and his own exacting standards speak for themselves. While William Morris may never have appreciated the computer, I believe he’d be hard pressed to find fault with Jim’s remarkable œuvre.

His Metal faces, in chronological order, include:

• Juliana Oldstyle 18pt, 1981
• Nephi Mediaeval 18pt, 1983
• Fellowship 24pt, 1984
• Albertan 16pt, 1985
• Cartier Roman 14pt, 2004
• Cree Syllabic 14pt, 2006
• Duensing Titling 12, 14, 18, 24, 36, 48 & 60pt, 2004-07
• Hannibal Oldstyle 18pt, 2003
• Quill 14pt, 2006
• Stern 16pt, 2008

His Digital faces are all sold through the Rimmer Type Foundry (RTF), which is a division of P22 Type Foundry. They are currently available through P22 and MyFonts.

They include, in alphabetical order:

• Albertan - designed as a 16pt metal face, to be a proprietary face for the Pie Tree Press. The italic was included a few years later
• Alexander Quill - originally designed in 14pt, it was finally cast in metal in 2005 for Leaves From The Pie Tree
• Amethyst - a well weighted digital face designed for book or advertising work
  
• Cadmus - a reworking of Robert Foster’s typeface Pericles, an inscriptional Greek style sans serif
  
• Canadian Syllabics
• Cotillion - a 1920s style “Social Print” face designed in 1999 intended for advertising luxury items
  
• Credo - a multi weight sans serif face
  
• Dokument - A Grotesque style sans serif
  
• Isabelle - a charming and graceful duo of faces originally designed by Elizabeth Friedlander for the Bauer Foundry
  
• Fellowship - a calligraphic face designed as a tribute to the ATF and cut in 24pt metal for the titling in Shadow River
• Lancelot - this is the handsome digital version of Duensing Titling cast in multiple sizes for letterpress
• Lapis - a casual slabbed serif style face with“edgy” curves designed for book and advertising work
  
• Posh Initials - a stylized set of initials harkening back to the days of the privileged British Ocean Liner Upper Classes
  
• Poster Paint - a version of one of the 1930s movie style fat faces. Jim did this form memory loosely based on Goudy’s Stout, but with lots more character
• Zigarre Script - a sumptuous brush script of the 20s & 30s, with a hint of Imre Reiner

His beautifully printed and illustrated Books include:

Alison’s Fishing Birds by Roderick L. Haig-Brown, printed for Colophon Books; 1980. Illustrations by Jim Rimmer; 1980. - sold out

Illustrations from Alison’s Fishing Birds

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens with an introduction from Crispin Elsted; 1998. Printed in Garamond with linocuts by Jim Rimmer - sold out

Illustrations from A Christmas Carol

Shadow River: The Selected and Illustrated Poems of Pauline Johnson; Autumn 1999. Printed in Centaur with Fellowship titling; with linocuts by Jim Rimmer; bound in Deerskin with Cedar Frond printed cover papers. - sold out

Illustrations from Shadow River

Leaves From The Pie Tree: Memories from the Composing Room Floor; 2006. Printed in Quill with Duensing Titling, with illustrations and linocuts by Jim Rimmer. - a few copies still available from P22

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain; forthcoming. Printed in Hannibal with linocuts by Jim Rimmer. For ordering information contact Jim at rimmertype@shaw.ca

Title page from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Other articles about Jim Rimmer

• John Hudson for ATypI
• Alcuin Society
• Simon Fraser University
• Heavenly Monkey
• MyFonts

He will be speaking at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday March 11th at the Arts & Letters Club.

Canada truly is a cultural mosaic, accepting and actively encouraging the expressions of a multitude of nations. At the beginning of March Canada Type, who has been responsible for reviving many great international typefaces, added another historically important face to their roster with the release of the first digital version of Ronaldson Old Style. Ronaldson was originally designed in metal by Alexander Kay for the MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan foundry of Philadelphia in 1884 and was one of the first great American faces and a very interesting story.

In 1796, two Scotsmen, Archibald Binny and James Ronaldson, set up shop in Philadelphia for what would become the first successful type foundry in America. In 1797, their second year of operation, they were the first foundry to release dollar signs ($) in the United States. In 1806, while expanding their operation, they acquired the casting equipment that Benjamin Franklin had brought from the Fournier Foundry in France many years earlier adding this superior equipment to their own. Their business grew steadily. It wasn’t until 1809 that the Binny & Ronaldson Foundry issued their first type specimen-book, a showing of about one hundred original metal ornaments. This is considered to be the first specimen-book of an American foundry.

On June 16th, 1809, Ronaldson wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson because the foundry was running out of antimony, one of the three components for casting metal type (lead and tin being the others), due to a trade dispute with England. His plea to Jefferson, who had recently finished his second term as President, was that without the antimony America would stay reliant upon English printing and be subjected to their “Political Principles”. In turn, Jefferson, who was an admirer of their faces and appreciated their entrepreneurship, wrote a letter to Pierre Samuel DuPont, a friend in Paris, enlisting him to help Ronaldson secure the antimony from France so their type-casting operation wouldn’t falter. It took almost two years and the French ship transporting it was briefly impounded by the English, but by the end of 1811 it arrived, mostly intact, back in Philadelphia.

They issued their second specimen-book a year later, in 1812, this one showing a variety of faces including various sizes of a Blackletter face, an elegant French Canon (roughly 48 pt.) in both roman and italic, and a number of smaller popular ‘Transitional’ faces, also issued in both roman and italic, all cut by Binny. In 1815 Binny sold off his share to James, to become a farmer, and the foundry passed over to Ronaldson. James issued one more printed specimen-book in 1816, beautifully printed on much finer paper, adding ranging figures to the ‘Transitional’ faces and, as the printing was much better than the previous two, it showed the faces to greater effect. By the 1820s, the Binny & Ronaldson faces were the most commonly used in all of America and foreign imports had dropped considerably.

Part of their success is attributable to the timing of their business. America, only 20 years into its Independence, was still reliant upon Europe for almost all of its type and casting supplies and thus in desperate need of local sources for supplies. Another reason was the fact that they created more of the then current ‘Transitional style’ faces, which were becoming increasingly more popular, ultimately eclipsing the ‘Old Style’ faces of the previous 250 years. But the main reason for their success was the nature of the partnership; Ronaldson had the solid business knowledge and Binny had considerable skill as a punch-cutter, with their skills complementing each other. Binny’s creativity led him to remodel the hand mould, allowing for increased production in the casting of fonts. In the introduction to his 1816 specimen, Ronaldson attributes much of the success of the foundry to Binny’s “genius and labour.”

In 1833 Lawrence Johnson and George F. Smith purchased the foundry, by then having transferred from James to his brother Richard, and it briefly became Johnson & Smith. Smith died quite suddenly 10 years later, in 1843, and it became L. Johnson & Company. In 1845 Thomas MacKeller and John and Richard Smith (George’s sons) became partners. When Johnson passed away in 1860, Peter Jordan took his place and the firm changed its name, for the last time, to MacKellar, Smiths and Jordan. In 1855 they began publishing a quarterly called the Typographic Adviser — “a general Asylum for Decayed Printers,” the first printer’s newspaper in the United States. In September 1886, when the newly formed U.S Type Founders’ Association looked to establish a common measure for printers, they chose the point and pica measure used by M.S. & J as the new standard. The foundry grew from those early Binny & Ronaldson days through the years to such stature that it is now remembered as the oldest and largest Type Foundry in the U.S. and one of the most significant in the world at that time. In 1892, it merged with 22 other foundries to form the American Type Founders.

In the midst of all that, in 1854 another Scotsman, Alexander MacKay, joined L. Johnson & Co. where he would remain through its change to MacKellar, Smiths and Jordan, for the next 40 years. Upon his arrival in America, Alexander changed his last name, dropping the Mac prefix, to just Kay. He had studied punch-cutting in England under John Skirving, another very skilled Scot working in London, cutting punches for such notables as Henry Caslon, Vincent Figgins and Stephenson Blake. While at MacKellar, Smiths and Jordan, Kay cut two very important historical faces - Ronaldson Old Style and Binny Old Style (1886) - both original American text classics, and named after the partners of the initial foundry. Ronaldson O.S. was released in 1884 and quickly became one of the most popular and most read (and most copied) text typefaces in latter 19th century America. It stayed in regular usage until the 1920s, when the ‘Old Style’ faces enjoyed their considerable revival period. While Binny and Ronaldson are the two faces we tend to remember Kay for, it should also be noted that his skill was such that he also engraved dies for the Philadelphia Mint used for making coins.

Despite the ‘Old Style’ appellation, Ronaldson is really a ‘Transitional’ face - falling between the accepted ‘Old Style’ and the ‘Modern’ classifications. It has a clear vertical axis, solid contrast in the stroke weight and sharp sculpted forms. Historically, it was well regarded for it’s unique and elegant capitals, with their confidently pronounced serifs. Often this style of embellishment proved unsuccessful, as it was seen as unduly ornate making the characters distracting and therefore undesirable. Kay’s skill was such that he was capable of including these features and making them fit well while maintaining the colour and legibility of the face. It borrows part of its style from the earlier Binny faces, particularly his Small Pica No.1 and Long primer No.1 from the 1812 specimen. When first released, it came only in roman in a variety of sizes. In 1889 a sloped Titling was released as a companion to the original. It had nowhere near the success of the roman and was often overlooked in favour of alternate italic faces.

In 1974, Ed Benguiat designed the typeface Tiffany for the International Typeface Corporation. Tiffany was based on a cross between the MS&J Ronaldson, and the 1904 ATF Caxton. Like most of the ITC faces of that era, it has an overdeveloped x-height. It shares many of the very pronounced serifs of Ronaldson, but is considerably darker with even greater contrast in stroke weight - more like a pointy Bodoni. It’s also the closest digital face to Ronaldson.

In the new digital rendition Canada Type is not only faithful to the roman, but adds an impressive companion italic that melds seamlessly with the roman. They also offer a mind-boggling number of ligatures, alternate characters, both lining and ranging figures, small caps and a very complete set of accents. All in all it’s a fantastic and extremely versatile rendition of this classic face. It should do nicely for another hundred years or so!

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