 The way to really experience this material is to see it in person So we encourage you to come to letter form archive and also to come to the book arts department here So As you can see we've already been taking that advice What you see here is from last Saturday the extended program in of type at Cooper West came for a Field trip to special collections here They're looking at a rubbing of the Trajan inscription on the table which was done by Father Edward Cattish and On the right you can see a detail of that rubbing You want to so Very happy to be here with you and kick off this lecture series and This will go on Not only this spring but continuing on in the summer and next fall and we hope for a long time after that We have had a similar lecture series through type at Cooper at Cooper Union in New York has been very successful and I Think it's been going for about five years now So We're going to walk you through some of what for Rob and myself are the highlights of Both the collection at the letter form archive and the collections here at the San Francisco Public Library This turned out to be the idea seemed good But then when we actually got down to trying to choose things we found of course We like too many things So this is really a very Sort of sparse overview of things and some of them are Chosen because we have personal connections to them in various ways and interestingly enough as we have Prepared this thing especially with the cooperation of library We found even more connections that we didn't know about to begin with so you'll hear about some of those as we go along We're going to start With the Trajan inscription with this rubbing done by a father Edward Cadditch Was donated to the library by Don Moy The rubbing was done in 1973 Cadditch actually made a number of trips to Rome to do these rubbings and he is responsible for two books on the Trajan inscription And and he did really a a Minute an examination of the inscription minute detail These are from the first book that he Published and it Cadditch was a truly Renaissance person he Not only did he figure out how these letter forms were made on the inscription which nobody really had figured out Since the time they were actually made He learned how to write them with a brush how to cut them in stone. He then proceeded to Do all the production of his own books These are tracings made from one of these rubbings There are tracings of every letter on the inscription and Cadditch's theory about the way these letter forms were made was rather Revolutionary that is nobody had really understood them before He recognized because he was trained as a young man to be a sign painter and showcard writer that these Letter forms were originally written with a brush before they had been chiseled in stone and It's enormously convincing the way he has reproduced them with the brush This upset a Number of people Primarily upset almost everyone in Britain who was concerned with typography and lettering Because they didn't know this to begin with and had other sort of half-baked theories about the way these things were made But over the years now, I would say most of them that I know anyway have become Converts that it's rather undeniable that this is actually the way they were made so seeing this rubbing is a Magnificent experience. I have to say Every time I bring classes to and I did this in New York for the last Four years bring people to libraries to see original work It has a kind of a magical effect where you you experience something in a way that you you cannot Do when it's on screen or when there is an image of it printed with half-tone dots in a book and Rob was saying when we saw this Rubbing on Saturday that every time he sees it it renews his this kind of experience and I have to say I have exactly the same reaction it's it's So I think ultimately that's the reason why we do what we do is that these things do have a certain magic to them and when you see the original things that is That tends to to evoke it So there is a good reason for preserving these pieces of paper That we have here at the library and at the letter form archive and it is wonderful to have Access to these things online and so on but I I have to say from my own experience with Not only myself, but with students in the flesh is different So let me just talk about this a bit before he moves on you missed the part about your teacher So what's on the left here is a photograph of Kaddish with Lloyd Reynolds Who was the calligraphy teacher at Reed College in Portland? Sumner's teacher at Reed College in Portland. So that's one more personal connection the letter here is From Alfred, sorry from Lloyd Reynolds to Alfred Fairbank the the British calligrapher and scholar Presenting a copy of the of the Kaddish book the first Kaddish book the Trajan inscription in Rome with the tracings and the photographs and This is in the letter form archive. We have Alfred Fairbanks copy of the book and This is Fairbanks reply now both of these letters are in the the pop-up exhibit in the back and you can't see the back of the Fairbank letter, but the juicy bits are on the front and Basically, he would have normally written a handwritten letter That's what he always did and and he did many times to Lloyd and his other correspondents but he says in the beginning of this I've typed this letter because I want to keep a record and He he goes on to explain why Kaddish is all wrong And it's interesting because the first book Which came out in about 1960 the Trajan inscription in Rome had very detailed studies of the inscription drawings and photographs and a little book which Kind of suggested his theory that they might have been brushwritten but didn't have the full logical Theoretical presentation of that which came later in the second book called origin the serif in 1967 so I've always wondered whether Fairbank changed his mind when he actually saw origin or if he ever picked up a brush and tried because You know you would know so anyway, this is kind of an interesting artifact and it's also a really good example of how the collections of of San Francisco Public Library and letter form archive complement each other because they have a rubbing they have a stone They have a number of other very special Kaddish things We have this Copy of the book with with the correspondence between Reynolds and Fairbank We also have Kaddish's paleography text from his time in Rome, which is completely annotated These are some of the brush letters. This is actually in both collections. This was a special edition of origin of the serif with 50 copies that he wrote the entire brush alphabet by hand Partly to prove that it could be done And intentionally with a dry brush so you could see the ductus and what was going on Do you want to say anything about these? these letter forms started and about around The time of the death of Julius Caesar maybe the year after 43 BC and they went they were Written on up into the second century AD maybe up towards the end with extreme faithfulness that is remarkably Similar letter forms were made by what something like 20 generations of craftspeople This is one of the longest runs of such things that I know of maybe the longest When you try to do these with a brush it is very humbling There were only a handful of people that I know of who can do a credible job of making these letters with a brush one of them was here very recently and Gave a workshop at the archive through a type of Cooper West. That's John Stevens and it is comforting to see that somebody Can do this besides Kaddish So these this work of Kaddish On the inscription inspired a typeface and it was a typeface that I Initiated and oversaw the development of was designed by Carol Twombly who did a wonderful job based very directly on on the Trajan inscription letters and this typeface has been Outrageously successful it's on And just an incredible variety of things now, you know book jackets, but also dog food and you know everything in between So it's been fascinating to watch that proceed. This is this is the type so The Trajan inscription and the Imperial Roman letter the 200 Or so years of the Imperial Roman letter very important because when we come to the Renaissance I believe that the 15th century is is an extremely important thing to understand in the history of our letter forms that we are using today And it's one of the things that I Emphasize in teaching this course that we are have really just begun at the letter form archive our year-long so-called extended program and typeface design because it's the century in which printing with movable type in Europe began and the century in which the first Roman typefaces were were designed and used the history of how that came about is actually I think Still not well enough documented and the standard issue Sort of story about it is that there simply was Copying the forms that came from humanist manuscripts this is sort of true, but the humanist manuscripts only started to be written at the beginning of the century and They had a very interesting design problem, and that was that the Capitals and the lower case Were united for the first time in the way that we presently use them before that in the Carolingian Period, which is what the humanists were copying the things that we call capitals the role played by the capitals was Was actually filled by unshaled letter forms So at the beginning of a sentence you would have an unshaled letter and that would be followed by these Carolingian minuscule letters so so only have about 60 70 years of Actually using this alphabet and and it definitely changed as the manuscript letters changed over the period of between the beginning of the century and and on into the first Roman types in the 1460s and And one of the problems that was faced was how do you how do you if you recognize that these two alphabets are used together As as a sort of unified whole how do you make them harmonized because they come from two different time periods very far apart They're really two quite different designs in many ways This is the Ipnerotomachia Polyphile this is a publication of all this minutious it was first printed in 1499 just barely an incanabulum and This is a famous piece of all this is typography. It's a very odd piece of literature It's written in sort of Italian with some sort of Latinizations and a little Greek thrown in and this and that and But it was very popular and Became it lasted on into the 16th century it was republished it was published in France by French printers And so on so it it had a lifetime and it was translated in English not very long ago You can get now an English translation with reproductions of these original woodcut illustrations But one of the things that I find fascinating about the the typography in this book Is that in some cases and back up to this one those letter forms on the sarcophagus are type Those are the Roman capital letters that were cut by Francesco Grifo for all this and Actually, I should say one more thing about this before we we go forward This this copy of the book is here and in special collections It's in the grab horn collection of the history of printing it was Robert grab horns copy But he assembled it from parts and so you can see here that the two gatherings that are Next to each other are different trim sizes because they're from different parts And I think it's still missing a few leaves, but and there's some water damage here and there But it's it's what he could manage to pull together of the thing And it's a remarkable artifact both because it's the hypnotic Machia, but also because it's Robert grab horns copy You can tell especially on on the image that you see at the right the woodcut that you see at the right that Some of the capital and there are many There are many illustrations of inscriptions in this book, which is interesting I'll sort of fantasy landscapes many of which contain inscriptions and those letter forms Are not type those are actually cut in wood and printed with the woodcut So This is an indication of the kind of growing awareness that went on during the Renaissance during the 15th century that the Roman capital letters were the original documents of the ancients and that they were very important and they came to assume more and more authority as a century wore on and people got better and better at making them and So the fact that they they appear in all of these illustrations is just kind of gives you some of the flavor of the kind of respect that they gained and Many of these Renaissance scholars went around hunting for inscriptions on art to record them They made these things called silo gay, which were catalog. They were the first epigraphists They made catalogs of these inscriptions and even drawings of them and the way the letter forms actually looked There's some more you can see on the left most We have Greek and That one I Actually think that one is Probably also carved If you look at the AT a key K a T a T that T a T is curned Curning type is a thing that you know, you can metal type You really want to try to avoid and there's many other instances in here where it's not done So this is this is something from the archive This is actually something that we now have three copies of oddly Although two of them are quite damaged and incomplete. They came with the the Tolanar collection that we acquired last year So this is the the Spiegel de Schrift Kunst by Jan van de Velde published in Amsterdam in 1605 It's an engraved writing book So van de Velde was the calligrapher who did the the models and then an engraver Made copper plates Of course in reverse And then they were printed by in Taglio to produce the book and Our Executive director Simran is actually an expert in writing books and she speaks much more eloquently of them than I do but She always makes the point that they're an interesting sort of amalgam of calligraphy and printing and publishing When you think of it you you have a writing master Making a calligraphic model, which is then indirectly Printed to teach other people how to write and By this time of the engraved writing books. This is About a hundred years after the very first writing books They're pretty much show-off pieces. In fact the largest word on every page in the van de Velde is VELDA You can see it in the bottom right there And here are some other example pages These are spectacular works of calligraphy and engraving and printing And I find them particularly fascinating because they're still I think they still have contemporary relevance some of them have such amazing textures and The asymmetry of the layouts is also fascinating It's always been one of my favorite books and it's it's a book that we pull out very very often with visitors because Nobody fails to be surprised and delighted by this thing You know they can come looking for mid-century modern design and Still be blown away by this or they can come looking for writing books or history of printing or whatever It's just a fabulous thing That's a particularly interesting texture Not the most readable again VELDA is the largest word So This one's yours This is I'll just set it up. This is this is from the tall in our collection and it's in the archive I think there may also be a copy here at the library This is the Badoni or Atio Domenica, which is basically the Lord's Prayer in a hundred and sixty languages Want to just mention again that Valerie Lester will be here Within a short time to give Let's take it March 9th. I think to give her lecture She has recently published A Book on which is a biography of Badoni and Quite well worth the Experience she does a very nice job of presenting the material beautiful images and so on Just a couple more words about the writing books the writing books are very interesting because the tradition of letter making for books Really gets captured by typography and the typographers the people who design type who cut punches to make type Really participated in the medieval tradition of not Telling what you did because your competitor Might learn about it and compete with you, you know Whereas the writing masters had quite a completely different agenda which was to tell everybody exactly how it was done and The whole letter making world sort of splits into two parts As the 16th century goes on and then onward from there Which is this whole tradition of writing and teaching writing and publishing these manuals and The designing of typefaces metal typefaces and they really come back together Only at the end of the 17th century with the Romain du Mois the Roman of the king Which we're not going to talk about in this lecture, but which is a very seminal event in the history of typography and Leads up to I think conceptually leads up to these typefaces Which were made by John Battista Badoni Badoni Was very very successful in his own time He had kings and queens coming to the little city of Parma to visit him And he he made very grand volumes He made an incredible number of typefaces, which were ultimately published in his manuale typographical Which was published by his Wife and by his widow after his death We had we do have actually copies of the manuale as well But this book is one of the last books that he did And it is a tour de force. It's just outrageous He learned how to cut these punches for non latin types Because his initial training as a type designer Was in working for the propaganda Fides in Rome the part of the Catholic Church that publishes literature for Everybody throughout the world and of course they had to use lots of different writing systems. So that's when he got started So here we have Yeah, I should I should mention the toll in our collection has about 20 or 25 of the propaganda Fide booklets which are Quite extraordinary and rare and some in many cases the the earliest Typographic representation of of a language We think it's a big deal these days actually that we're making non latin typefaces now, but Javanese Some of these are romanizations and some are in the native alphabet, right Chinese Mongolian Take a bite him. Thanks. He wants to zoom in. Yeah. No, it's a PDF. Can't do it. Sorry This is all this is the Lord's Prayer Yeah, it's the Lord's Prayer many times, but no, I it's this one is Cyrillic for example and given the scale of it I I understand it's hard to see the details You just have to come over to the archive and see the original Or take a class where we have on the wall a 4k display that that basically acts like a 40-power microscope So These are some examples of the type foundry ephemera in in the archive collection. We have now almost 8,000 pieces between the combined toll in our and and my own previous collection and These are delightful things and it's it's rare to find a large aggregation of them. There are a few places in the world that have it But they have Basically that we're talking about individual brochures often the first or second release Of a typeface and the foundries the designers they put a lot of effort into them Special production you see things lots of color or foil stamping You also tend to see more examples in use that is typical in in the larger types of specimen books So these are three Examples of 20th century revivals of Badoni that happened to be in the collection and then a fourth By this guy and team This is a project that began In I think it actually began in 1990 90 or 91 and took several years to finish and that was to try to reproduce something of the huge Variety of typefaces that Badoni made he if you look through the manual you see that for every size He made multiple typefaces and you read in the introduction to the book that he wanted to have the right Just the right typeface for every book that he published that he printed So I Promoted myself to the ITC to To be the art director for this project and we already had two Designers who had been recruited to work on it And we began by going to Parma And looking at The more the amazing thing is that you know a lot of what Badoni his his whole it's the punches the matrices all his books and so on are still there Basically in their original state So what you can see is quite remarkable the museum is Is still open it has a new director and all You know you can come to a bit to Valerie's talk and hear much more about it but what we decided to do was to make a small size and a large size and then in between sizes and And So we it was it was a very interesting process which used in the The computer technique of interpolation in which you can have two versions of something and you make in between like if you have a light one and a bold one you can make in between weights or if you have a wide one and a narrow one you can make in between widths and So we did that in this project. It worked out remarkably well, and I think Many people have told me that they regard this as the truest reproduction of Badoni's types as as a revival Interestingly enough the the the ones that have been influential in the line a type one has been the most influential in this company It was very very widely for headlines and newspapers for a long time still is Is really a lot more like a dito than it is like a badoni and So I think you know we're our agenda really was to try to recapture some of this feeling of the original badoni This is a piece that's also in the pop-up exhibit one of the things that We have in the archive is a collection of avant-garde typography from The various movements of the early 20th century like Dada futurism constructivism in the Bauhaus This piece is by tail van dosburg the Dutch architect and designer It's called meccano. It was a Short-lived periodical. This is issue four five, which was actually the last issue of it As is true of many of the avant-garde periodicals, they're extremely rare I've been able to find only two others in this country one at MoMA in New York and one at the Getty and And then there's this and I actually this one we shot the entire thing. It's not very large So I'll just run through these To give you a sense of of what a complete object looks like One of the interesting things about the data typography is the the various orientations and in this piece in particular there is There's type at 45 degrees at 90 180 Sideways upside down and a very creative and dynamic use of type sizes and ornaments This center spread is a sounding poem by Kirchfitters Schwitter's in van dosburg collaborated closely and So it's not a surprise to see Schwitter's in meccano van dosburg collaborated on the first issue of of Schwitter's periodical called merits Which was the the Holland data issue The sounding poetry is really fun And it's actually a common thread throughout the avant-garde's all of the avant-garde's had sounding poetry of one kind or another There are Recordings that you can actually get on CD or find on the internet of Schwitter's reading his sounding poetry and there are hoot I mean he was he was Well, of course data is known for its sense of humor, but Schwitter's in particular Had I think quite a remarkable sense of humor More sideways stuff and Then that's the back cover of the piece. So this is 16 pages. It's about well It's in the case. It's about maybe eight inches tall And just an extraordinary piece of experimental typography This one is also in the archive. This is this is a book with a story I found this book in a bookstore in Delaware about 40 years ago And I didn't think much of it at the time. I thought well I found a wonderful Rudolph Koch book which I had never seen before It was his first writing manual and then a couple years after that I started working with the Neugebauer Press of Austria and in particular with Michael Neugebauer and What I had not realized is that This was his father's copy now Friedrich Neugebauer is a famous calligrapher and in fact The one of the first things I did with Michael was distribute his father's calligraphy book in the US I knew Friedrich's work, but I didn't think Fritz was the same as Friedrich so one time Michael came over and I showed him this book and he said wait, that's my father's nickname This was my father's book so the following year I went to Budgorzern to visit Friedrich and He confirmed that indeed it was his book and not only was it his book, but he bound it and hand lettered the cover If you look into the history of this book, it was never actually published in hardcover only in wrappers So this is a unique copy And then I think you wanted to say something about Koch Koch was a remarkable person In many ways some played somewhat similar role in Germany to the role that Edward Johnson played in England in reviving calligraphy and Teaching it he He was not only a calligrapher. He also was a printer. He cut punches. He designed typefaces. He like Edward Johnson who also designed typefaces he Had a workshop. He was a very active In the sort of German version of the arts and crafts movement he was very fond of William Morris and the English arts and crafts movement in fact Apparently he was known to say that he really couldn't believe that William Morrison wasn't a German So This book I think is quite wonderful it it shows you And his black letter typefaces are to me I think in many ways the most appealing of all the black letter work that I have ever seen They just have a certain kind of liveliness to them that Is remarkable and here you see These small variations on the letter forms, which is a kind of a thing that he You know has in his work that really gives it a certain kind of liveliness that you don't normally see you Used to seeing black letter typefaces that look like picket fences, but cocks don't look like that They they also cut his own punches cut his own punches. So So here is a is a is a is a manual which is showing you these little small variations I'm all of you who are in my class should take note of this Some of his formal pieces This is another avant-garde piece. This is this is a surrealist piece The cover is by Marcel Duchamp The the title translates as the seventh face of the die And in fact the text and the illustrations are equally inscrutable Rather wild Typography here the so it's only the cover that's by Duchamp the the layout of the interior pages is by the author George Hunier who was As you'll see quite an experimental typographer and and one of the better-known surrealists So these these spreads combine typographic collage with photo montage It's quite erotic both in subject matter and imagery And it's it's one of the seminal pieces of surrealist Typography and there's also I think a pretty clear sense of humor in this work Okay, it's off So from lascivious to luscious Herman's off recently passed away there has been a great deal of Coverage in the various levels of the media about this I'm I'm very it's it's wonderful to see that and and the outpouring of respect and and the sort of Accounting of personal tales about how influential Zaf was and people's lives have been very fascinating to read and I think you know We just wanted to Again pay homage to him and show a couple of these extraordinary pieces that are here in the library From publication that he did which was engraved by the man who also cut punches for his types August Rosenberger And this is a book called Federer and Stiegl in German pen and graver in English and this is the plate and the print I Have always thought that Zaf's that the typefaces that Rosenberg cut for Stemple Were Had that extra something that when line a type got a hold of them and made them for the line of type machine Somehow evaporated so almost like the difference between Seeing things on the screen and seeing things on paper in the flesh, so It's it's wonderful to see these things you can look at them. They're right in the case back here and Marvelous work This is something that that I Chose from the library's collection to talk about because I've always been a fan of this guy's work and we have very little of it So these these there are two or three books here that I'll run through pretty quickly there by Hans Schmidt Who is a German calligrapher and book designer and book? artist they're in very small additions typically about 20 copies and I Just want to say that it's it's a tribute to The curator emeritus of the Harrison collection who's here tonight Susie Taylor This is one of many examples of her good taste in bringing some amazing contemporary work to this collection and I've been looking for them for years and we can't find them. So you just have to come here to see him So this one is from I think 1984 I Don't know German so I can't tell you what they're about. This this is woodcut As is much of his work this is another one from from 1986 and and Not only are the letterforms amazing, but the way that he uses them across and between and Around the spreads is quite delightful This is yet another one called Novalis from 1987 and This one is on a Japanese tissue and as you can see on the okay So this is the title spread that is on the on the recto the right reading version of the title page The tissue is quite transparent. So when you turn the page, that's what you get you get the Reverse of the title page and the beginning of the text which is actually fading through the tissue letter by letter So this is what it's like to turn the pages Okay, that's Schmidt Some more lascivious for some So this is a project done by a Dutch designer named Anton Beek He he did this originally in 1969 It's Any any published a book with these photographs and he called it beautiful girls And I'm not going to comment too much on the sort of political Issues that the news involves but the one thing that I really was drawn to about these Things was the fact that he actually made quite good letterforms And you know, this is a tradition of using bodies to make letters that goes way back it goes back to the 15th century There are many many examples of it. Sometimes the bodies are clothed. Sometimes they're not and They do other things as well and You know, it's a very interesting thing that you can you can Google, you know Body letters and see what you get as images. They're they're very interesting This color version of the book was published in 2011 and it contains now These Figures as we call them in typography This is this is a piece from the archive. This is a single. It's actually a collage by the Chuck artist concrete poet jury Collar and He has a little bit of surrealism in him But he did virtually everything that he did involve text in one way or another I think you can yeah, you can see pretty clearly that the collage is is made up of text and he just had an amazing way of abstracting text into Textures and form He wrapped these collages around sculpture. He did, you know original collages and prints like this He also did typewriter art and and concrete poetry and had a long career as as an artist and concrete poet So he's always been one of my favorites This is this is the only original piece in the archive, but we have a lot of secondary material on him This is Again a tribute to Susie This is an envelope addressed to Susie here at the library by Georgia Deaver and Georgia is a San Francisco calligrapher that that Passed away a couple years ago sadly quite young but her work was just amazing and Her archive is here in the library I had a personal connection to her Which is that in the 80s she did work for Noigabar Press, which was our sister company and for alphabet press This was from a series of greeting cards that we did in the US And it's funny because we were in the library and Sumner was actually picking out Georgia's work and he said oh We have to shoot this one. I said well, I published that So anyway, you wanted to talk about Georgia. Well, Georgia Was remarkably prolific she worked on a great deal of great variety of commercial work She clearly liked to doing book jackets I Read an interview with her just yesterday and what she talks about that and but she also did, you know wine labels She did packaging. She did I don't know a huge variety of Kinds of commercial work and she did personal work as well Which you see a bit of here so you know She had a kind of a freedom in her writing which I Think probably Is unsurpassed Quite quite remarkable and I know that That when I'm sure that when she she Applied to be a member of the Society of Scribes and illuminators and I have a feeling that This might have upset them because none of them can do anything even close to this That's true I just want to point out this piece is in the case in back as well And there's another piece of hers. That's slightly lascivious and then the last Artists that we're going to feature is is Tom Ingmeyer Thomas Ingmeyer He is another San Francisco calligrapher Still alive and kicking and doing amazing work and in fact He has an exhibit up currently at the book club of California He also has a piece in in our show at the San Francisco Center for the book These pieces are from a collection of broadsides of his that are in the archive The library also has a wonderful collection of his original works manuscript books and and other things and these were done as Kind of a series. They were done in mostly in 2013 and mostly with Octavio pause text. I think they're well The one on the right is paused He has such a wonderful sense of dynamic balance and And he's also especially in recent years gotten incredibly creative with his letter forms Some of it is quite abstract Usually there's a text of one kind or another underlying it, but and there we are. Thank you