 Hello and welcome to the San Francisco Public Library, to this wonderful Lot of Form Archive lecture tonight. My name is Samantha Cairo Taubi. I am a librarian in book arts and special collections on the sixth floor. And many of the images you've been looking at are from our collection. So if anything excites you, come on up and see us. We have a couple of different collections that would interest people in topography. One of them is the Robert Grabhorn History of Printing and Development of the Book, lots of different things from the 14th through the 21st century. So amazing topography collections, catalogs, paper sample books, books printed by Aldous Menucius to Robert Grabhorn himself from the Grabhorn Press. We also have the Richard Harrison collection of calligraphy and lettering. And we have examples of over 100 artists, manuscripts, broadskites, correspondence, sketches, including medieval manuscript leaves. And also, some Father Cattich inscriptions. We have three of them. One's on display in the rare book room. The other two are just really, really, really heavy. But you're welcome to come and take a look at them. We also have some of his rubbings from the Trajan's column taken from 1971 and books written by him as well. So welcome tonight. And I'm going to hand this over to Grendel, who's going to introduce our speaker. Hi, everybody. Wow, welcome to Letterform Lectures. It's amazing to be back in the carrette after two years, two plus. So thank you so much to Andrea, to Samantha, and Kenny, and all the librarians and staff who are making us so welcome here. My name is Grendel, and I'm Education Director at Letterform Archive, which is also the home of Type West, our School of Type Design. And I want to give a massive shout out to Skilla Zachalini, who's in the second row here. Skilla is the mastermind in the background of this lecture series. So thank you, Skilla. Okay. Okay, well, here's my little public service message. Yes, the pandemic is still here. So I am promoting masking. Let's do it and stay safe and healthy. So Letterform Archive is the home of Type West, School of Type Design. We have a whole bunch of great lectures coming up in 2022. So look at our website for more details. We have an exhibition open right now. It's called Strike Through, and it is so awesome. It's a whole bunch of political posters. It's an exhibition of protest graphics that was curated by Stephen Coles and Silas Monroe. And this exhibition will make you want to grab a stencil or some collage materials and go whip up some hard-hitting posters to take to the streets. And don't worry if you don't think you have those skills. We have your back because we've got a workshop, internationally known radical artist, Fabiana Rodriguez is leading a workshop for us in art and social justice graphics that you can sign up for. It's just one day, only on September 17th. So you can find that on our website. And then, woo-hoo-hoo, this weekend in person with tonight's speaker, Paul Herrera himself. He's going to serve up the catish way to do brush written letter forms with a side of slate letter cutting. So this workshop is happening in just a few days. Tomorrow is the deadline to sign up. So sign up now if you haven't already. All our in-person workshops require appropriate masking and physical distancing, but we also have great ventilation and high-grade air purifiers. So no pesky viruses at the archive. We have a couple other workshops coming up. These are online. We have a crash course in type selection with our very own Stephen Coles and Christopher Slye. Everything you wanted to know about choosing type, but we're afraid to ask. This top team of type experts will get you started on the path to great type choices. And they'll give you tips on how to better organize your type library as well. This is for beginners and pros. Also, our popular instructor Lynn Yoon is returning to school us in the art of flourishing, which contrary to popular belief is not a result of happy accidents, but is really well planned out. So in this workshop, you'll learn the basic elements of flourishing and you'll dissect what makes good flourishing, pleasing to the eye, and then you'll combine those elements to make your own designs. Okay, our letter form lecture series is continuing. Next time is online on August 9th, when the director of the Museum of the American Printing House for the Blind, Mike Hudson, will share with us the beautiful and surprisingly complex history of printing for visually impaired readers. Don't miss this one. So for more information on our upcoming letter form lectures and our salon series and other upcoming workshops and events, as they happen, go to letarch.org slash events. Better yet, become a member of letter form archive today and stay in the loop and support these events like this one. Okay, finally you can follow us on Instagram. All right. So welcome to letter form lectures 2022, our first in-person lecture since March 2020, which is amazing. Letter form lectures are co-presented by the SFPL and letter form archive. So once again, I want to shout out to Andrea Grimes, to Samantha Cairo-Toby, and to Kenny Avala for all their work in presenting this series. So with us since 2016. So letter form archive, by the way, is a nonprofit institution housing over 85,000 works of graphic design history. We are dedicated to the art and the craft of the letter form and we would also like to thank Adobe for generously sponsoring this lecture series. You can view all letter form lectures online shortly after they happen. Just go to our website, letterformarchive.org. Okay, main event. We are honored to welcome master calligrapher and letter cutter, Paul Herrera to the carat today. So Herrera's work was done exclusively with Father Edward Kaddich beginning in 1967. Paul worked as an inscription cutter and a calligraphy seminar artist with Father Kaddich until the time of Kaddich's death in 1979. At that point, Paul was invited to continue Father Kaddich's classes at St. Ambrose University and did so until 1989. Paul has also served as a faculty member of six international calligraphy conventions. During his 40 year career, Paul has conducted numerous lettering seminars for calligraphy organizations throughout the United States and Canada and the United Kingdom. And he continues to do regular commercial inscription work and he was an instructor at the former Davenport Municipal Art Gallery. And now he works full time in his studio and offers workshops in brush writing and stone inscription like the one coming up this weekend at letter form archive. Okay, Paul told us that when he was a mere baby stone cutter at the age of 18, his teacher would sometimes put him to work when he had other projects to attend to. And if Paul got out of hand, which he apparently did on a regular basis, Kaddich would burst in and berate him for quote, unquote, jackhammering the stones. Eventually Paul learned a more delicate touch, but hey, we all start somewhere. Okay, we're honored to introduce Paul Herrera tonight. Thank you, Paul. So the green light is on. How's my, how's my? Good. I'll bring the mic so if I screech by stepping in the wrong direction, I can't stand still. You'll notice it, but. So in the conversion of my PowerPoint to our presentation here, the face on the screen changed. So imagine that as Imperial Roman. Okay? I know y'all have really good imagination, so that's what it was, but now it's this. So my talk tonight is about, again, Imperial Roman. It starts out with the Emperor Trajan, first century Roman emperor. And when I saw this movie, Maximus, the Gladiator, he was also known as the Spaniard and he was adopted by the emperor essentially, but he was a warrior, which Trajan was a warrior. And he too was from the Iberian Peninsula and he was adopted by the emperor Nerva, who was not very popular with the Roman people, so that when he passed on and Trajan became the emperor, everybody said, oh good, finally. So one thing that Trajan did was he expanded the Roman empire, took in a lot of territory, just created a nice big happy place, until one of the areas got out of hand. So they decided, ah, we're far enough away from Rome, we can cause a little problem, we can carry some raids into some Roman territory and just be bad behaved. So Trajan had to go up and sort of spank them, went back home, problem solved. Couple years later, lo and behold, they started acting up again. So Trajan took his army, built bridges this time, and when the Romans came in full force and they began building bridges, you know you're in trouble, you might as well run for your life or just figure you're gonna die by the sword. So there's the emperor on horseback and this is part of the freeze that is carved in the entire column and you'll see a picture of that here in a minute. But it's one image after another of that whole campaign where he basically conducted an old fashioned war. You go in and you kill and slaughter everybody, burn their homes, gather up all the valuable stuff and take it back home. And in Trajan's case, it was back to Rome. So you can see some of the slaughtering and so forth. You see knives being used against spears and the Roman army was really quite vicious but they were very organized as well. In fact, they were the first professional army in that they were a paid force. They weren't just a bunch of volunteers. So they actually paid for their services. So when Trajan got back home to Rome, he took a lot of that riches and built a nice little forum. Basically, kind of comparable to modern day shopping mall. Benefit to the Roman people and it was a really nice place and it was a really special place. Provided you were a Roman citizen. If you weren't, you were a slave most likely. So just to kinda give you a little background on what's going on. Trajan also built a monument to himself in the middle of it. And here's a photograph, thanks to our friend Carl who took this photo recently. And that's the way the Trajan forum looks now, what's left of it. So at the top, of course, was a statue of Trajan. Modern day, it's Saint Peter. But here are some images of the column. On the left-hand side is a drawing by Father Cattage in one of his publications and in the center, another photo by Carl, a little more of a close-up. And on the far end, the right-hand side, there's an illustration from a volume printed in 1843, I believe it says. Yeah, 45, 45. There, the entire inscription is intact. Now, there's a gash out of the center, which was done, I can't remember the date, but it was later added so that I'm just guessing you could put a little porch out front. And the caretaker could sit in nice Roman evenings and a little cool breeze and sort of enjoy the sights around for him. Here's another illustration by Cattage and another drawing that has the full inscription intact. So any reference that I had was basically from Father Cattage's photograph, which is what this is, of the entire inscription as it exists now. So when Ned Cattage was in high school at the orphanage, he was orphaned at age 12 and was sent to Mooseheart, where it is now, they want to be called a child city, not an orphanage, and it is more of a child city on the lines of Boys Town in Omaha, that type of thing. But when Ned Cattage was there, it was an orphanage. And so the orphanage basically trained, it was a fraternal organization, a loyal order of Moose. His parents both died. And the obligation of the orphanage was to train the children of their members for a career. Cattage was trained in printing and music and sign painting. So he became a sign painter, professional sign painter down down Chicago, was proud to say that he was a union and card carrying sign painter professional in Chicago in the 1920s. And of course, he would also add in those days, Chicago sign painters were the best of the best. So here he is in his book, the graduation book, I should say. When he's a senior, he's about to graduate and he's in the sign painting apprenticeship with the unions downtown. And of course, at that time, one of the famous books that was well known was Edward Johnston's book, Writing and Illuminating and Lettering. In that book, there are pictures of the Roman inscription letters from the Victorian Albert plaster cast in London. So Cattage, his woodcut letters are on the right hand side of your screen. He used the references from that book to carve these letters. He would later write to his friend Graham Carey that he was rather embarrassed by these letters because if you take a real close look at the ends of the strokes, the almost non-existent serifs are really blunted. They're just not much more than a flare at the end of the stems and so on. So this was done in 1935 at the University of Iowa and Iowa City. When Cattage joined the seminary and he was sent to Rome, he studied the actual inscription on the monument himself and that's where he saw that they actually had quite nice serifs. Every letter had a nice extended serif unlike the wooden letters that he just made back in Iowa City about the same year, 1935. So 1936, he still is in seminary and he wasn't ordained until 1938, a priest friend back in Iowa City sent him brand new copy of Frederick Gowdy's book. Frederick Gowdy, a type designer out of Illinois, wrote a book and called it the letters, the imperial Roman letters from the Trajan inscription in Rome. Cattage, in his little correction in the title page, said the title of this book should actually be letters from the plaster cast of Victorian Albert Museum in London, which in his first publication that you'll see in a minute, he proved are an error. And so one of the notes he did make was fortunately Gowdy left these generous blank spaces in his book throughout the book so that he could go ahead and write his corrections in the margins. Now the two red squares that you see are the actual text of the book, everything else are Cattage's notes and that's just the letter B. It goes on through the entire alphabet. Mostly in English, some in Greek and also some in Latin when he got real carried away, Cattage. So he made several trips back to the monument. They make more rubbings. So we don't know how many rubbings there are. Apparently there's one here and you have one at the letter form archive as well. And fortunately, Rob is quite, and you all are quite proud of that as well as you should be and it's brought out on occasion. Not very many calligraphy classes that you can go to where they'll bring out an actual rubbing of a Cajun collar. So here I am as a young lad helping make a crate to send off some more slates to who knows where. But our favorite letter style was the Imperial Roman and you fellas from Wichita would probably recognize this. It's in one of your buildings and so the bronze we didn't make, that was done by someone else but everything else on the slate is the work of Father Cattage. So here is the full size image of the Cajun is from Father Cattage's book, Origin of the Seraph and the cover of it is down in the lower left hand corner there. His other publication that came out in 1972 is letters, I'm sorry, read pen and brush alphabets. And two of those plates are the Imperial Cajun capitals which in those days, 1972 published, okay, those were all hand drawn by Father Cattage himself and then reproduced in his book. No Roman typefaces in those days. So here you can see a proportion of what a rubbing would be if it's all sprayed out and so that's the entire inscription had to be done three lines at a time. And of course he would record the date and the year that each rubbing was made in the nice little blank space that was provided at the bottom, okay. And the Cattage's full-sized cast is in Chicago. Last time I saw it, I couldn't help it. Have a picture taken in front of it, sorry. But that is his cast and he painted in the letters as they would have been originally painted in the inscription when it was new, but Cattage being the proper scholar, he did not paint in the missing letter parts, okay. Any distortions, any cracks, anything that was chipped or missing, he did not paint that in. Very little known fact. His first test piece, which was just the partial side of the inscription to see how it would come out just to kind of a quality check. That is in the St. Ambrose University Library on the third floor. No one knows it's there because until recently they didn't know what they had. It was in a closet somewhere so our little non-profit back in Davenport said, you know, you really ought to put this out on display. There might be some people interested in seeing it. It's now behind Plexiglas. I was able to take a few photographs before they put it behind the Plexiglas and the purpose for painting in only some of the letters is to show that this difference between, well, the difference in legibility between what the Romans rightly did and those inscription cutters who relied just on the shadows to define the letters, okay. Big difference. This is Cattage's first publication based on the inscription and the rubbings that he made from the inscription. Now he wrote notes on that back in the mid 1940s, applied to the Guggenheim for funding to go back and do more thorough and he was rejected. So he thought, well, he's just a young guy and must be nothing there. In fact, his letter of rejection said that they found nothing that would add to the sum total of human information. So he was rejected until he ran into a fella by the name of William Edison Dwiggins. And there just happens to be a biography of him at the Letterform Archive. Dwiggins, who was well respected, said, you know, I think you got something here kid, I want you to promise me that you're gonna publish this someday. So Cattage learned his lesson and he got together enough money to buy his own printing press. He wasn't gonna rely on another institution. He bought his own printing press, he bought the paper, he bought the ink. In fact, one of the reviews of this book is, Cattage, he wrote out the entire text and an alphabet that he designed and the review said, Cattage pretty much did everything except mix up the ink, the batch of ink, and make the paper for the book. This is called Letters Redrawn from the Tragedy Inscription in Rome, not from the Victorian Elbert, okay? The reason I'm showing you that is because the backup, what a scholar Cattage was, how he recorded it from his rubbings and these are a couple of plates that I'm gonna show you in the next couple of slides. The plate from his book is reprinted up above there and the images below are the rubbing from the column. So you can see how these things match up and this is basically what I used as reference. Not just the rubbing, but also the letters redrawn. The letters redrawn are traced exactly from the rubbings so that each letter represents one letter from the Tragedy Inscription from the rubbings. Now, here's an example and it has red and green arrows. First of all, the red arrows point to the baseline reference of every letter on the inscription. The little green arrows show a little break. Those indicate where letters join, letters touch and they don't all touch in the same place or in the same reference. So this is the reference that I used having worked with Father, having known the Roman, rather than just write out Imperial Roman letters the way I thought it would be nice and pretty. I took not only the rubbings that we have, but also his reference and I compared those to the actual rubbings. So you see the little letters of numbers underneath each letter. The two P's there, one, one refers to line one, the top line, the first iteration of that letter P. The second one is one, two, line one, the second iteration of line of the P, which are different and then so on with the V. Line one, the second time the V occurs. So here are another plate from that series. And what I did was I blew up that plate to the size that I wanted, which was 50% of the actual inscription. I blew up that photo reference and then I took every letter from his publication and I reduced it 50%. So, and that was the size that I was going to make my inscription. And then I did my paste up, letter by letter and striking the baseline and then using, remember those little red arrows that had the baseline? That's what I use for every letter. Some just kind of bounce a little above and below and some serifs kind of dip. They don't go straight across. It's not typography. What Kaddish saw when he went to the actual monument, he saw that this inscription was first written by a sign painter, a Roman sign painter with consummate skill and the knowledge of each letter form in his mind and was able to write it out fluently before coming back and carving. So then all I had to do was transfer that to a piece of slate. And I was, Cinebos College was where I went to school. It became Cinebos University. And so when it became university, they had a big piece of slate out front, two slates that said Cinebos College. So when it changed to university, I was teaching there and they said, well, we need two slates that say university now. So I said, okay, right, we can do that. The father was gone by that time. So I made a rubbing and I transferred and I laid out the word university and one of the undergrad students came along and said, oh, that's how you do it. What do you mean? Well, you just trace the letters and put them on the slate and then you just carve. I said, you know, don't tell anybody. That's how easy it is, okay? That's our secret. All you have to do is lay the letters out and then just carve. Right. So this is the half scale image that I have and that's me carving it. Notice the magnifying glasses. I have 73 year old eyes now. So I use the carving glasses. Here's a close up and there's the v-cut and there's all the dust that I made while carving the letters. Some still painted, some being carved randomly here and there just for entertainment instead of going from shark to finish, you know, bouncing around a bit and it only took two years. So constantly making rubbings and you'll see how we make a rubbing here in just a little bit but constantly making rubbings as the letters progressed and comparing each letter to its representative letter in the publication. So I'm not just doing random anything. I'm trying to stay as loyal as I can to the actual inscription letters as recorded by Father Cattage, okay? And here's how you make a rubbing. Lay a piece of graphite on top of the finished cut letters. Lay a piece of newsprint rather and you take a stick graphite and you rub the letters and that's how it's done. Nothing to it. Back again, constantly referring to the photograph and the inscription. More rubbings each letter. I think I went through a whole roll of news prints bit by bit over and over, constantly checking but you see the serifs, you see the little waivers there and straightening up those lines and so on and oh by the way, the little marks inside the letter, the striations we call them, the chisel marks, that is particular to the Cattage school of inscription cutting. Those striations, those chisel marks, you want those because those help reflect the gold and the chisel mark follows the corner of the chisel which is at the root of the V and it must go in a straight line from the root of the V to the edge of the letter and it has to be perpendicular to the edge of the letter. That's how precise it happens, it has to be. So at this point I figured you might be getting tired and how detailed is this guy going to get so I'm thinking are you not entertained? I hope you are. Carrying on, more cutting, scribing in the serifs just to make sure they get them exactly right because the serifs aren't all the same. Remember the little tick marks? Making sure that a serif intersected the previous letter at just the right spot and just the right proportion. That's why I have to wear the goggles. So finally, it's almost finished cut and comparing it again to the photo image back and forth, back and forth. Sometimes people ask oh what is that bar, those three bars across there. If you remember in Roman times, we had no Arabic numerals, they were Roman numerals. Piece of cake, all you had to know was Roman letters. The Roman letters were also numbers. So that indicates the time. And just about when I was ready to go to the guild, it was sitting in the studio and the sun came out on the nice Iowa day, came in through the door and gave this shadow. And I thought, where's my phone? I've got to get some photos of this because it's not going to last very long. And so here's the Star Wars version. But to see the shadow, you can see the striations on the C. You can see the little chisel marks. Perpendicular to the edge following around. And so finally, it was gold leaf time. And it looks sloppy because when we go to put the gold leaf on, we make sure that the gold size, which is what the gold leaf sticks to, floods the cut, we call it. So in other words, you make sure you get it inside the entire cut and off onto the surface. And then you just polish away everything that's on the surface. And what you're left with are the gold letters, okay? Yeah, gold does that to people. Ah, okay. So I kind of checked around. I contacted the university, St. Ambrose, and I said, oh, you've got this partial cast over there and you've got that on display. Would you be interested in my half scale trajan inscription? Wait, so we went first? No, I just, no, no, no. Hold your horses. You didn't ask me? Hold your horses. I thought, all I have to do is carry it across town then, you see? But I'll show you, you're a lot smarter than St. Ambrose. You're a lot smarter. Because they said, well, you know, we've got the agenda already set for the meeting and we just can't add this to it and I'm not sure, we'll have to talk to so-and-so and that person's gonna have to talk to such-and-such and right about then I hung up the phone. And I said, I'd better call Rob. And to be quite honest, that's why I don't teach at St. Ambrose anymore. Haven't for a long time, okay? So I loaded it up in the van. Rob says, well, how are you gonna get it out here? I said, I'm gonna put it in my van and I'm gonna drive it out. And he goes, what? So well, I suppose I could put it in a crate but after two years, I've got a good van. I'll see you in about three days. So out we came and guess who was there? There it is. And oh, by the way, you'll notice that the missing letters in the actual inscription have been restored. I found a father-catted sketch of those letters that I'm sure he intended to print in his next publication which never was published by him but I found those and then I kind of guesstimated what those letters might be from some of the other letters and so I had to make them the size of all the rest and just pretty much put those into place because in the missing portion, there's parts of letters before the, I didn't point this out, sorry, and the image. There are little bits and pieces of letters previous and after that gash and so I used that and then filled these in. So trade an inscription in San Francisco. That's the result. Two years labor, examining the rubbings, examining the photos, working with Father Kaddish. I just had to do it. I just had to do it. At this point, I invite any questions you might have. There's a question back there. And just to let you know, as far as I'm concerned, my trade and slate is where it should be. Here in San Francisco. Yeah, your question. Would you discuss Kaddish's controversial thoughts about serifs going into the printing world being derived from stone cutters? Oh, you know, this business of his, rubbings, his letter forms being turned into type. He was never around to see that, really. That came after he had passed away. He died in 1979. And I think the typeface that you're talking about didn't come out until mid 1980s. So he would be flattered that it's being said that it's being said that his studies were used as the basis for the trade and typefaces. I think, you know, he's the source. One more question here. Yeah. That's not exactly what I was getting at. Okay. My recollection is that he had a view that printers who designed type put serifs in their type because they were following stone inscriptions. Ah, okay. Well, yeah, stone inscriptions. Now, my English friends and I differ as far as our preferences. They know I'm steep in Kaddish. I mean, that's all I ever knew. So that was where I grew up. I grew up in the school of Kaddish. Some of them prefer the flat top A's and M's, okay? And some of the type designs come from that. Father, now in the Gaudi book in particular, Gaudi being a type designer and going to the photographs from the V&A. His problem with Gaudi in particular as a type designer, if I could just kind of focus on him. He respected Gaudi, but he thought that by going to the V&A, Gaudi put, for instance, on the letter A, the Majuscule letter A, on the right-hand oblique. Gaudi added the interior serif, which doesn't exist on the Trajan. And Gaudi claimed to use that Trajan as those letter designs that he published in his 1936 book. But that's just to be specific about Gaudi. Kaddish would, in his other book, he pointed out that in certain publications, and he named names and origin of the serif. If you buy origin of the serif, if you ever get a chance to purchase it, pretty much everything's laid out there. And he points out some of the theories that, for instance, the mid-arm of the E, the Roman E, the type designers have an up-turning serif as well as a downturning serif, not Trajan. Makes a nice type design, but you can't say it's Trajan because Trajan does not have the up-turning. I mean, look at any of the E's on this. There are, in the mid-arm, there are no upturned serifs that equal the downturned serif. The downturned serif is from the movement of the brush and getting a nice clean edge. The brush, knifing in, we call it, to get a nice square, clean end, and then knifing out of the bottom. Common Chicago sign painter, way of brighting fast and formal, and then it was just cut. Another argument to kind of continue on with a little bit of the differences between caddage and other people, some inscription cutters claimed that, oh, there was a division of labor in Rome. The one who wrote the inscription would never have sullied their hands by carving it, say, that's dirty work. Well, whether it was the same person or not, both people had to have the exact image of that letter in their mind. Now, in our school, caddage would do the layout, or if I did it, he would come along and correct the letters, and then I would cut them, or he would cut them. We took turns finishing up the slates. So, theoretically, you weren't supposed to be able to tell the difference between his cutting and my cutting. Two different people, okay? But I was not allowed to finish cut a letter until I had that proper image of the Roman letter in my mind. Is that helpful? Okay, all right. Yes. Okay, here's another question. Okay. Paul, I wanna say thank you for all this work. From a preservation point of view, it's quite incredible, especially with how delicate these kinds of objects are. I have two questions, and I have a thousand more, but I'll save it. Fire away. Have you had the chance to go to the column? I saw Carl Roars had a, I don't know who he bribed to get in there. Is there a process to do that? And two, there's a lot of amazing work that you have to be here around this area to visit and see. Do you have any plans to publish or further disseminate this kind of knowledge about the treasure column? So when I was in the process of doing this, some of the photographs that you saw were taken by a colleague of mine, Amy Nielsen, and she's a very excitable person. She's very knowledgeable. She has since taken up inscription cutting, and she's like top notch as well. So kind of at her prompting, and when I thought about it, well, yeah, this is a good idea to just kind of put something together. So I did put a little book together that you have a copy of at the Letterform Archive, and I can make more copies of that. It's just something I download, and then they print it up and so forth. Yeah, so if you go to Grendel and say, hey, I'd like a copy of this, it's possible, yeah. It's just basically a photo book with some explanation, a little background, and a translation of the inscription as well in there. Yeah, I have to say it's super nice, and it's really nice that we have that. On hand, along with the inscription so people can kind of compare and see the process. Yeah, yeah. Question over here? Hi, so I'm kind of new to this whole inscription, although I've heard of it, of course, but I'm wondering since you mentioned that there were variations in some of the letters, I'm wondering if you, in your opinion, are they just mistakes from actually, they act of doing it back then with the tools. Are they variations based on just what was available in the surface available, the imperfections of the stone? I mean, I'm just wondering like when you mentioned that there were variations, what kind of variations were they? They are so subtle, you don't even notice them at first. Yeah, just now, as I said, on the fifth line down, adeclarondum, okay, the RNA do not join, where they could very well join. The seraph on the oblique of the R dips just slightly below the seraph on the A, okay? Whereas in other places, the R and the I, like on the fourth line, about almost halfway through, maximotriptriptri, the R and the I seraphs join, but very, very slightly, you know? And that's what I meant by the variations in the letter. Now, my English inscription cutter friend pointed out that on the Ns, the letter N, as in my band instructor used to say in high school, N as in no, no, nanette, okay? My inscription cutter friend, Eric, pointed out that the letter N, rather than a noticeable difference in the thick and thin of the uprights, stems on N and the oblique, on the, generally, the thick and thin change based on a three degree cant angle of the writing tool, but on the N, they differ very slightly so that the N is almost even weight all the way through. And he said, well, if I ever get around to doing this, I'm going to adjust that. I'm going to make the Thins thinner than the oblique. Okay, his option. I wanted to stay true to the actual inscription. My choice, yes, another question. Okay, hang on one second. Would you discuss the source of your slate and how it's prepared? Sure, sure, yeah. Kaddish was one of the original recyclers. Being a childhood depression, 18 years old, he was released from high school, orphanage, set out with a, as I mentioned, a apprenticeship with the sign, painting folks in Chicago. Oh, you might have gotten a little, what do they call it, out west, western grub steak, you know, maybe a sawbuck or something. Here you go, Kaddish. We've got a place lined up for you. The union's going to take you in and take care of you. So, by the time I met him, in 1967, 68, when I was a baby stone cutter, he was a recycler. And he would call me up and say, Paul, they're getting ready to tear down Lincoln School, a three-story bricks schoolhouse. They've got all slate chalkboards. So, we're going to go over there, bring your truck, we're going to go down there, and the pipe fitters and steel recyclers and all the pickup trucks would be there, okay? They have the option. It'd be hot, July. And I said, they're going to start at the top of the building, so we're going to go up there and see how much they're getting from the slate chalkboards, and we're going to let them have it. We're going to take the ones on the second and third bar, we're going to take all of them. That way, we don't have to carry them down as far and put them in your truck. I said, okay, father, I'll bring my crowbar, okay? So, we get them home. We had polishing bricks, I call them, very fine grit, 440 and 600, and we polished the surface so that it gets nice and flat. I spent hours with water running across the surface, just polishing the surface of these stones, these slates, because a lot of them had been painted over the years and just painted black instead of polished. If they had only known that all they had to do was polish them, it would have been a lot easier work for me as a kid, you know? So, we'd polish them nice and smooth first, and then we'd do the layout, brush written, and then cut. And so, the whole purpose of making sure that it's nice and smooth on the surface is that when you gild, when you saw that I splashed over to the edge of the surface of it, nice and smooth, so then all you have to do is just polish it once again, get all the paint or gold or whatever it is on the outside of the surface, and all you're left with is the letter. So, that's essentially the whole process, then we seal it, make it waterproof, waterproof, yeah. Good? But recycling, recycling. Not letting anything go to waste, including rubber tires. We made fly swatters out of rubber tires. The inner tubes. Oh, okay, here's another question. Okay. Do you know, is the plaster cast that was, that R.R. Donnelly had, is it still on display somewhere in Chicago or? I've heard that it is not. It was at their corporate headquarters on Wacker on the 36th floor. And if you intend to go there, looking for it, best call ahead first to see if it is still there. It was the first time I saw it. I can't remember the year, but it was one of their subsidiaries on, oh, it was in North Chicago somewhere. It was a little ad agency. And so I looked them up, went up there, walked in the front door, and there it was, right on the wall. I was like, oh my God. I hope they know what this is, you know? But a number of years passed, and so when we were looking for it again, where I had my photo taken, it was in a computer lab on the 36th floor. Climate control conditions and all of that, which is what it needed, because he just, he painted the whole surface, and then he painted in the letters, you know? And I also read some correspondence, when I was, oh, by the way, shameless plug. I wrote a biography of his life, just some things that I was able to put together by doing research here and there. And I just happened to have copies with me. But, and every penny goes to support our non-profit. But when I went in there, I saw that, did the research. There was correspondence saying that there was going to be a big letter exhibit in New York City. And they wanted this cast as the centerpiece, and there was argument going on with the Donnelly people, because they didn't want it leaving Chicago at all. And then others said, well, you know, but this is so important, it's in New York City and blah, blah, blah. And so I think eventually it was moved for this exhibit. I haven't found the records on that yet, but by that time, Caddish had died, and they had to insure it for something like $2 million, just to transport back and forth. So they know what they have. So on the topic of the plaster cast, I have a little question. Did you explain, and I just missed it, what was wrong with the plaster cast that Gowdy was working from? The V&A, he was working from photograph. We joke that, you know, for two pints on a bob, you can get your own photograph of the plaster cast in London. And so I'd like to be able to scroll back to that, but I don't know what slide it is and so forth. But if you ever get a chance to see a photo of it, the M in the lower left-hand corner, it's, they just lined up a camera, took a photo, and in those days, the aberration on the edges tended to distort the letters. And so the M kind of, the one leg kind of kicks in a bit and they were designing tight based on that. Oh, this is the source, you know? And it was a plaster cast, which was an error to begin with because it was painted in, Kiddish actually respected Everett Johnson so much in one of his correspondence. He says that had Johnson been available or had he been involved with actual painting in the letters, it wouldn't have been as messed up as it is to this day. Because the cast is, it's in plaster, first of all. And if you know the properties of plaster, as it dries it shrinks just a bit, just enough. And then it was done in sections, which were then stuck together at the museum. So in the text of his 1961 publication, he actually draws out and points which letter in which line is distorted. And I can show you on this, that bottom line, Manset, Locke, Konstan, the S and T, that's one of the joins, and the left-hand top, well, the crossbar on the T, S-T-A-N, stand. The left-hand side of that crossbar on the T is foreshortened so much it looks wrong. It's just, and it's not an exact copy of the Trajan, it's the way the plaster was formed and it was jammed together, basically. And he even says in the book that whoever painted it in, again, the sign painter and cat is coming out, said they dripped some paint on the surface and they didn't bother to clean it up. It's just whatever. But he points out letter for letter, the distortions and all the things that were wrong. And that's what really got him mad, because it's like, oh my God, this is the Victorian Albert Museum. And this priest in America who went to high school in an orphanage and then he went to some tiny little backwater college in Iowa, and I like to say Davenport, Idaho. See if anybody catches it. And then he went to State University for advanced degrees. What kind of pedigree is this? We went to Oxford in Cambridge. We know what we're talking about. And here's this no-name priest that no one's ever heard of until he published his books. And now everybody says, yeah, these are written with a brush. And Father Cattie says so. And here's the read origin of the serif. It should convince you. I can go on and on, believe me. Okay, I have one more, very probably very short answer question. And then if anybody else has a question, please raise your hand. Speaking of Gaudi and that book that Cattish marked up. Yeah. Where is that? St. Ambrose University Archives. So we have to raid them. We just had our hands on it. Take a workshop from us in Davenport and we can get you in there. Does anybody else have any last questions? Thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming.