3. Wood Type Manufacture

I was fortunate enough to arrive at the museum in time for a 3pm tour.  Our tour guide was a former employee of Hamilton Manufacturing involved in cabinet making, including cabinets to hold metal and wood type.

One of the benefits of having a production facility situation near a major waterway is that logs could be floated from their source to the plant. 

Carriage Saw

Planer

1. Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum

http://woodtype.org  

 I had a warm welcome at the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin the weekend of September 9, 2017.   This is a photo blog of the experience. Relief printing type made of wood enjoys a long history in the annals of letterpress, and though currently made only at enormous expense in small shops both in the USA and abroad, no finer example of the craftsmanship in the trade can be found. Our inkjet and laser printers of today are marvels of technology, but it's a safe bet you won't be able to find them, let alone operate them a number of decades into the future!  Not so with wooden type fitted into iron chases.  Curated fonts of wooden type that are upwards of 150 years old can be found and are still usable in the newfound limelight of letterpress. Hamilton, in addition to making Wood Type, manufactured all manner of woodcraft and appliances for labs, schools, physician and dental offices, and for a time even for the home.  I'll give a brief timeline with more authoritative references alongside the photos. This facility offers a clear value to any endeavor expressing human culture through relief printing.  I recommend contributing, re-blogging and if possible, visiting the museum on a regular basis!

  What follows is a series of photos looking at some of the other products that Hamilton manufactured.    Mike Moore The Letterkraft Press Union, Kentucky.

5. Ornaments and Borders

Oak typecase from the late 1800's

Ornaments and Fractions

Most wood type is machined using a pantograph, which is a router that copies the letterform from a pattern.  The type itself if made from blocks of end-grain maple wood that has been dried and cured, resulting in a finished type that resists changes in dimension and can hold up under the tremendous forces employed by letterpresses.  More on that process later in the blog.

The ornaments below were punched using steel dies slowly rammed into finished maple blocks.   A photo of the machine is included below.

2. Wood Type is an historic resource worthy of curation

Here there are upwards of one and a half million pieces of wood type history.  Most are not on display, but those that are, exist in glassed cabinets that are really quite beautiful.  Because of the glass fronts, not all of these photos will show the splendid detail.   Again, if you can, visit the museum!  You won't be disappointed. My recollection of the one font of wood type my father owned was of big, utilitarian block San-serif letterforms that were devoid of any embellishment.  The fonts on display at Hamilton are much different, very much more detailed, ornamented and stylized.   And incredibly old!

Most of this museum's wood type is available to print on the museum's many working printing presses. Working in the museum would be a joy and i fully intend to take them up on their offer to use their resources, which include instruction and materials!   I believe the cost was $125 a day, but call to verify.