The Tiny Typecast

Glenn Fleishman

3.8 (4)
DESIGN

We have conversations about the history of printing and type paired with how this gives insight to people today. What does the past still have to teach us? And what are we learning fresh today about things that happened 20, 50, 500 years ago? Each episode, new guests. Hosted by Glenn Fleishman.

02/22/2022

Dennis Duncan and Paula Clarke Bain on Indexing

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

53 min
11/09/2021

A 19th Century 3D Printer

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.

10 min
07/26/2021

Phil Abel and Nick Gill: Two UK Printers Across an Era

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.”

1h 11m
07/12/2021

Daniel Schneider, Industrial Archeologist

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

56 min
07/01/2021

Grendl Löfkvist, Printer, Calligrapher, and Educator

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

1h 3m
06/14/2021

Amelia Hugill-Fontanel, Associate Curator in the Cary Collection at the Rochester Institute of Technology

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

50 min
05/31/2021

Alix Christie, Author of Gutenberg’s Apprentice

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.

59 min
05/17/2021

Steve Finan, Memories of the Last Days of Metal Printing

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.

53 min

3.8

out of 5

4 Ratings

We have conversations about the history of printing and type paired with how this gives insight to people today. What does the past still have to teach us? And what are we learning fresh today about things that happened 20, 50, 500 years ago? Each episode, new guests. Hosted by Glenn Fleishman.

Creator

Glenn Fleishman
Years Active

2020 - 2022
Episodes

17
Rating

Explicit
Copyright

©2019–2021 Aperiodical LLC. Licensed under CC-BY-NC 4.0.
Show Website

The Tiny Typecast