 I took one of those Leonardo da Vinci naps over lunch. Just 15 minutes, right? You ever hear about those Leonardo da Vinci naps? And I had the worst dream, and the dream was that I was giving a talk at a type conference, and I had to follow Louis Feely. And you were in it, and you wake me up when it's over. I'm really happy to be here. I was very, very fortunate to lead some study abroad tours between 2009 and 2014 at the University of Minnesota. And on one of the trips, we were hosted by Dr. Klaus Maival of the Gutenberg Museum. And he had these four journals in his personal collection. And in the journals were roughly 6,000 ornamental capital letters from the Renaissance. And so you're looking at a page on screen right now. And 350-some pages, about 400 books, different books represented. And the tragedy, of course, is somebody had to cut these out of the original books. These are printed initials from the Renaissance. You see here, they're from 1508 and 1511. And around about 1890, somebody decided with the scissors, you know, these would be prettier if I just cut them out of the books. So kind of an act of vandalism there. But it was very common to trade these like baseball cards back then. You'd have a little envelope of all your favorite woodcut engravers and your printers represented. And so not the same level of respect for historical books the way we have today. So in these journals, and as I said, there's four of these different journals, you have notations like this. You've got these beautiful Lombardic capitals you see there. And then you have these handwritten notes. L-U-G-D is right here, 1511. And L-U-G-D, what is that? Well, after talking to some colleagues in printing history, that's the Latin name for the city of Lyon in France. And like, why didn't they just call it Lyon? Anyway, a long story. So these are from 1511. And so you would have this envelope on the left side of the screen you see there, and then a little notation that got put in the interior of it. And I was absolutely fascinated by these working for Hamilton Wood-type Museum. These were wood-type. These were engraved either in pear wood or in boxwood. And they're just exquisite. And they're about the size of a small postage stamp. These ones happen to be about one inch square. So think for a minute about carving these letter forms in reverse and in relief, which means that if you're trying to do the angry eyebrow of the angry bird, which is where the idea came from, it's like you don't carve the eyebrow, you carve everything but the eyebrow. So as we did our research, we were looking at classifications. We enlisted the help of Dr. Paul Gale from the Newberry Library in Chicago, absolute genius of a man, and very generous with his time and energy. And he helped us come up with these classifications. So you've got fluorated, including plant or flower motifs. You've got historiated letter forms. Those are people that are either from actual history or from fictional history, which is, yeah. Inhabited letter forms, those characters that have people or mythical beings or faces in them. Speaking letter forms, those are the design. They use the first letter of the word included. And I'll show you some examples of these in a minute. Zomorphic letter forms that have animals. Crible, which is this kind of a stippled dot pattern in the background. Calligraphic, that which shows the stroke of the flat nibbed pen. And ornamental, in this last category, decoration that's non-representational. That was actually the most difficult bucket category to establish because it's the largest bucket. And we'll talk about that in a second. So what I did was I put some basic borders on these. And you kind of get an idea of how beautiful these letter forms are. And again, just think for a moment about size. They're five feet tall on this screen. And these things are the size of postage stamps. So what you see here is in the upper left-hand corner, you've got an inhabited letter form. It's historiated. And it's a speaking initial for St. Cecilia. So C is for Cecilia. Right side, upper right-hand corner, you've got Crible in the background and Fluoriated Adam and Eve, of course. Back then, serpents had ears, which I didn't know. So that was a cool thing to discover as part of my research. And then you've got on the lower right-hand corner inhabited, somebody being stabbed in the back really hard. A couple more of these. We asked ourselves questions as we looked at these. Where did they come from? Why weren't the names of the books included in these notations? And so there was a lot that we didn't know about them. And you see a lot of hidden notations. This guy here hiding inside the queue, he's super sinister. This one here, I don't know what to say about this one. This Z is really beautiful. But on these slides, you can see the cities and the years in which they were printed, not the years that they were cut. So very important to understand that these letter forms could be used on multiple books. The other thing, this is me when I've had enough coffee. So I like to call this the crazy daisy. I don't know if you remember that from when, if you're old like me, there's a long story. So what we wanted to start doing was when we needed to ask some questions about why we had some information and why we didn't have other information. And Dr. Gale pointed out to us that the notations were taken from the colophons of the original books. And as you know, colophons are the printer's notation at the back of the book stating the name, excuse me, the city that they were published in the year and the name of the printer. And so, but not the name of the book. And so if you're holding the Nuremberg Chronicles, you don't need the name and the colophon, you know that you're holding the Nuremberg Chronicles. So that was an important discovery for us. So the first thing that we, of course, tried to do is to make wood type with these. And the technique that we wanted to begin with is CNC routing. So CNC routing gives you incredible detail. It's a 14 degree bit. Actually, that's more like 14. Yeah, so a 14 degree bit that goes down and cuts out all these letter forms. In order to do that, you need vector files. And so here you're looking at the vector content of it. And so in the previous slide, in order to hold on to this kind of fidelity, all of this imperfection, all of the perfections and imperfections, scanning it, tracing it, and then telling a CNC router to do it, the CNC routers like, come back tomorrow. I'm gonna be busy. So we decided that that was too long of a pursuit and we switched to laser cutting. And laser cutting is a really great option because it lets you use TIFs or bitmap images. And so you filter these things down. You get mostly to a black and white stage. You don't have to deal with tracing because the interpolation with tracing is nightmare if you've ever done detailed tracing and I'm sure you all have. So laser cutting on end maple blocks. We have this maple in our collection and you see a couple of different renderings of this block and notations about how much power and speed. So S represents speed, P represents power and you can vary those things. And if you're trying to letter press print with these blocks, you have a balancing act to match. If you do it too shallow, the ink can pool in the interior and if you go too deep, you just burn out the images. I like to call this light, medium and dark roast. So there's a couple of the images that we wanted to test with and what we had to do is go to worst case scenario, find the letter forms that would be, present you with the most challenges. Related to that. And so there are simple letter forms and complex letter forms. And so we found one setting laser settings that were just right. So this is a close up of a finished letter form with a little ink on it. That's the exhibition poster in the background that is a pig playing a bagpipe which apparently they did back then. So on the left you see a printed example of it and on the right you see the original block. But when you encounter these prints off of your printing press and then you look at the original, the presses are a little bit better now than they were then but the skill involved in carving these and the complexities of inking, large areas of type, large pieces of type and then 10 point type. Those are two very different inking requirements on letter press. So we're having to anticipate the printing process, the printing presses that you're using in order to make this happen. Here's another example of a nice letter V and next to the finished printed poster. So from here I'm just gonna run through about 150 of these letter forms. Yes, I'm really gonna show, no maybe not that many, we'll count. All right, so this is from Leon in 1520 and one of the things I'd like you to pay attention to as these go by is look at the design of the letter forms. So we've got sort of a Lombardic letter form. Paul Shaw was saying these were Versa letter forms but beautiful examples of these bifurcated terminals and look at that crossbar, right? We've got a beautiful foliated letter form there. This just blows my mind, this is an inch and a half square and I'm just absolutely in love with that with the letter forms that are there. This one I included because it's an example of a beautiful letter form that's poorly printed and so if you put too much ink on the type, press comes together, it squishes it out like peanut butter or jelly or both. But when you look at this, this one and then compare it to this one, you see the amount of skill that's involved with printing with an incredible amount of detail. St. Cecilia again, we've got that nice angel in the background. This baby is either trying to wake up his dog or scare the fleas off of it. I'm not sure, the dog seems unimpressed either way. This ornamentation in the background is what some of us would refer to as arabesque. You have a lot of influence of Moorish art that you see in Europe during the Renaissance. Our friend the pig again and that, you look at all the nuances of the tonality and all the great imperfections of this one and then you print a new one and you go, I like the old one better. This is an example of an inhabited sea, that little face you see kind of hidden in there is a very important thematic idea. We'll talk about that more. Our friend the streaker, this is an early form of streaking. I didn't know that it was popular back then but apparently it is, but only in the letter C. So that's good. Combination of a caterpillar and a butterfly which is cool, maybe showing metamorphosis. This is a service, that's the Latin word for deer. So this is what we call a speaking initial, so sea for deer. And one of the things that you think about at this point is literacy. A lot of the people who may have been carving weren't necessarily readers. So it's a really interesting extension of that one. This person's either being beheaded or knighted, I'm not sure which one. We really beautiful inhabited initial here. So you've got not only people inside the initial but the initial itself also being made up with facial features. Beautiful griffin there. This is an example of what we call the green man. So a green man is a face that's embedded in foliage usually. Folage comes out of their mouths, their ears or what have you. I like this bird because it's eating a cactus and this slide shows you a book that this letter form appeared in and the context that you get, the whole side to side comparison of, well in 1566, this is what clip art was. And it's important to note that these woodcuts were not made specifically for these books. You had a tray of ornamental type. You'd pull the D that you needed. This is a history of the wars between England and France during the time of Mary Queen of Scots. We've got Saint Ezekiel, another speaking capital. We got back to the stab in the back. And one of the other things we wanna pay attention to is the major cities, the major printing cities that these appear in. The other thing I like about this E is that it shows the like epigraphic typography we're cutting into stone. So you've got that three dimensional feel to it. This is from Aldus minutius III, the Aldean press, Venice 1576. People dancing with the letter F, which I guess was a thing back then. Did someone just clap? Good. All right. Early veterinarian care, I guess. Checking to make sure that the dragon has teeth is okay. This letter G is really beautiful. The Crible pattern in the background. This is what we refer to. Actually, Paul Shaw just told me this, but this is a curly G. And this curly G you see is a much older predecessor. Here it is again. This is on the cathedral door of the city of Mainz. This door was cast in bronze in the 11th century. So this curly G is really beautiful. Side trip through some great ligatures. Look at all that great stuff there. Next lecture. Architectural and G, this is really beautiful. H, you look at the way the shading is handled. Sometimes heavy on one side. Sometimes true drop shadows, et cetera. This is an owl and smoking pot. It's a Portland Joe. Sorry. Thank you. Adam and Eve again. And the thing that I'd like to focus on with this kind of engraving is the engraver, it's not that you engrave the eyebrow. You engrave everything but the eyebrow. And so you look at the shading in these and look at the detail. And the fact that you have to carve away everything. This bird is an inks, I-N-Y-X, which makes it a speaking initial. Beautiful sun and moon from Mayans. This is Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. That scene with Charles and Heston where his hair turns white, I think that's what's happening. And it actually looks like Charles and Heston now that I think of it. A really beautiful phoenix. Again, a nice three-dimensional letter M there. This is a seraphim, those baby heads with wings. This is one of the oldest letter forms in the collection. This one, I don't know. It's just so cool, I can't even believe it. And if anyone knows what this is, come and tell me afterward or shout it out now. But it's just an exquisite figure of someone's imagination. This is a manticore. If you saw the Harry Potter films, you'd know what a manticore is. So here you see the cutout version on the left and another example of the letter form placed inside the book. And again, we look at these beautiful classic Roman letter forms, 1559. Look at the beauty of the italics and the decision on the part of that printer to put these beautiful things together. This is the goddess Minerva. So the artistic director saying to the engraver, yeah, she needs a blindfold. How do you want me to engrave that? So I'll just give her a blindfold. That's what she needs. So Minerva is a justice, I think. Anyway, this one's really cool to me because it's a letter casting a two-dimensional shadow on a three-dimensional space, right? You got that landscape in the background, but somehow the shadow floats in space. So I really like too. This is what we refer to as the Holbein-esque style. Hans Holbein, an amazing artist from the 16th century. He himself wasn't an engraver, but he would commission engraving to be done. Again, me having enough coffee. And as we look at these, these are the dates that they're printed, not the date they're carved. And so in many cases, we find books that are 60 or 70 years apart with the same initials in them. And so they are a really valuable resource for printers. This is rearranging a pee, I guess. This is a cool one. This is another speaking initial. Pee is for Piper. And either the dog that he rode into town on doesn't like the music or doesn't like the fact that his owner is riding him into town with a stick and a key. This is a good example of an ornamental letter form when you see these beautiful ribbons. It's a very common architectural detail, but it's an ornament. There's not a category for ribbons, but that was one of these things that, well, what should we call this? This is another one where I'm thinking about the conversation between the engraver and the printer. Can you make the bear really angry? Yeah, I can make the bear. And make the birds really angry too. So just work those eyebrows. Really exquisite cue. I like this guy hidden in the cue there as well. Really great owl. And as I look at the detail of this letter form, and I compare it with this letter form, this is really a sublime, really sublime craft. No magnification, very few eyeglasses being used back then, all being done by daylight. Balaam is a Old Testament prophet from the Book of Numbers, in case anyone was curious. This is a Seder getting ready for a Halloween party, I think. I wanted to add that one in. The devil and his icy penis. I don't know if that's for sure, but that's what I've been told. And he's got his laying his hands on this great amphora of wine. So clearly a good time is going to be had tonight. I was hoping that this was a speaking initial, S for snail, but the Latin word for snail doesn't start with S, so they just happened to go together. One of the cool things of these designs is they all have these borders on them. And when we printed the exhibition poster, any letter form that you use that didn't have a border on it, the paper can settle, which means that any wood that's lower than that surface is going to show up in the print. So the borders become not only an aesthetic consideration, but a technical one. Really nice, unshel U. Really beautiful V. The other thing that we know is that U and V are the same rendered, can be rendered by the same letter. V is for virgin. I don't know if that's a U or a V. Sorry. I'm here all day. I'm almost done. It's OK. Hang in there. I like that W a lot. Inline letter form is really great there. This is probably a speaking initial. The West Wind is known as the Zephyr. And so you've got the wind blowing. Amelia Hugo was speculating that. She's a great printing historian at RIT. And then a beautiful Z. This is absolutely exquisite. This is a short illustrated book on artillery and fireworks printed by Johann Lechler from 1564. And again, looking at one Z custom made for a variety of jobs and then the type version of the metal type version of that Z. And as always happens, when Z shows up, that means that's the end of the talk. So 16 seconds. No, OK, go ahead.