 following Louise Feely. So it looks like that's coming true. So I stand before you today to share with you my adventure in letterpress metal type identification, specifically with the collection of metal type at Stern and Fay printers. Now I do not want to present myself as an expert in Futura, not by any means, but this is more of an example of how I was thrown into the fire during a routine inventory of metal type and how we got into a bit of a pickle when we discovered that the metal type wasn't necessarily what we thought it was named. So to start the story I want to take you back to the original location of Stern and Fay printers on the banks of the Skagit River in northern Washington about 90 minutes north of Seattle and this is the original location of Stern and Fay on what we lovingly refer to as the print farm. Now Stern and Fay was started by Chris Stern and Jules Fay and I met them in the fall of 1998 and shortly afterwards began a letterpress apprenticeship with them. Now in the 1990s a lot of letterpress shops were shutting down and what Chris and Jules were doing was quite unique for that time. They were gathering letterpress equipment and creating under one roof a letterpress print shop, a bindery and even a metal type foundry. And so what you see in these pictures is just a small amount of the collection that they carefully curated of metal type, wood type, the presses, any of the equipment needed to do this type of work. Now unfortunately Chris became ill in 2006 and passed away in the fall of that year. That led to the first full inventory of Stern and Fay's equipment which was a massive amount of work done by the thank, by the gracious, I cannot emphasize this enough, volunteer work of several people in the letterpress community throughout the Pacific Northwest. This inventory allowed for Jules Fay to very carefully downsize the studio into a size that's more manageable for a sole proprietor. She moved it closer into town to what we refer to as the dairy barn where she existed for a couple of years and it was in 2014 that we did the second group of inventory so that she could downsize yet again to truly move into town and be more accessible. And the time period that I'm speaking about today is just a very short period in early 2014 between January and March. So with any large task, the first thing you would do is assess the situation. So we printed out the 2012 inventory and we started to go through it. It's a very basic inventory. It has everything you would think it would have. It has the typeface name, the point sizes, the location of the type within the studio, including the type cabinet or the galley, the quantity and the condition in which the type is in, meaning does it have all of its characters? Is the type worn? Is it in good condition? Can we still work with it? Finally, the foundry. And as you can see here in the column on the right, this is where some of the gaps in our knowledge started to illuminate. Now, an equally key part of my research was carrying around Mac McGrew's American metal typefaces of the 20th century. And throughout January 2014, I was doing quite a bit of travel for both work and for personal reasons. So I literally carried this book everywhere I went, along with the spreadsheet. Together, these two things gave me almost everything I needed to move forward with this inventory process and help keep it on its very tight timeline. Mac McGrew's book has a lot of great details about typefaces that were manufactured in the United States as metal type, including printed samples of the work, as well as written history. So what you see here are a lot of different examples of the metal typefaces that what we might refer to as Futura. So I'm going to be using that term as a blanket statement to cover all of the knockoffs of Futura and how they existed in the US, specifically how they come into play with Stern and Faes collection. So first, of course, we have the real Futura manufactured in Germany by Bauer type foundry. Baltimore type foundry put out a version called Airport, lanced a monotype to 20th century and American type foundry put out Spartan. Now, Stern and Faes collection as of 2012 had close to 1400 entries in its spreadsheet, which looked like this. 357 cases of type, 65 of which we identified as Futura in some form, over 600 galleys of type, 100 of which were Futura. February came around and I was finally able to get back up to Northern Washington and join up with Jules and her studio to see if, in fact, the inventory really told us where the type was existing at that time. And you can see me here with Jules with our laptops bundled up because it's February doing our work. Now, we had a very analog set of tools that we use to identify the type, which in today's digital age might seem a little bit unconventional. So I introduced to you the letterpress boot holster complete with two pens, a thin one to write on your spreadsheet and a sharpie that you could use to write on your painter's tape, which you would then put notes on your type case galleys, sorry, your type cases, your galleys, very easily removable, very easy to fix if you make mistake. We also used a paint can opener to hook onto the edge of the metal galleys and pull the galleys out from the racks. Some of those galleys were quite heavy upwards of 30, 40, 50 pounds. We also used a pika pole in order to measure the point size of the type. And of course, a loop to look at the type under magnification. Finally, again, it was really cold in that studio in the mid fifties or so. So pair of gloves cut off the fingers. You can still work with your hands and feel the type. So we went through all 1400 entries of the type in the studio, identified what had moved, and then we updated the digital spreadsheet. Now we also noticed at this time that some of the listings in the spreadsheet didn't quite sync up with how the type was listed on the type cases themselves. So rather than go down that rabbit hole right away, we simply flagged that type made a note both on the physical location as well as in the spreadsheet and then decided to come back to it after we'd finished, definitely making sure that we knew where things were in the studio. Very focused work. So when we did finally have a chance to go back and truly identify the type, I focused mainly on what was in the Futura collection. So once again, the characters that we're looking at are Futura, Airport, 20th century, and Spartan. Now in Doug Thomas's book, he is able to take a look at the different digital versions of Futura, overlay the outlines, and show you where those differences lie. It's a great format, but it's not practical for a letterpress studio. Remember, we had over 100 galleys of type and 65 cases of type. There was no time to print it all, scan it, look at it, compare. So instead, we looked at the physical form of the type itself. In other words, we started studying the parts that didn't print in order to figure out exactly what the identity might be. We started with the low hanging fruit, which is ATF's Spartan. American Type Foundry puts a series numbers on their lowercase m's and h's that tells you right away that it's made by American Type Foundry. So if we didn't see a number on the lowercase m or the h, we knew it was not ATF Spartan and perhaps was something else. We could then take that number, look at an index or an appendix, I should say, in the back of Mac McGrew's book and easily identify by number what the type face name was. So number 683, Spartan Black, super easy system. ATF also put a capital C on its uppercase o's and its i's so that you could tell the capitals apart from the figures, in other words, the zeros and the ones. So that's not to confuse them when you're working with type. So again, if you didn't see those marks on the zeros ones, capital O's or cap i's, not ATF, therefore it's not Spartan. We would also look at the baseline of the type to see where it fell on the body of the type and if it didn't align to what we definitely knew was Spartan, we knew it wasn't that. We also looked at the nick shape and alignment on the side of the type and again, if there's not alignment or parity, not from the same studio. So we were looking for patterns and very much so, we're identifying things by process of elimination. We would look at the depth of drive, which is the non-printing shoulder of the type and the distance from that to the printing face of the type itself. You can see here Spartan is actually quite deep compared to the piece of type on the right, which we believe was made by monotype. Now, turning the type to the side, you can look at the pin mark. If there's a pin mark there, perhaps it might tell you who the foundry is. I don't have those memorized, but I can tell you if I don't see it matching up, I know they're from different foundries. Looking at the body construction of the type, most type looks like what you see here on the left. It's solid. Looking at the piece of type on the right, you see that it's hollow and knowing other parts of certain face collection, we are finding patterns in which most of the type from Baltimore type foundry seem to have this hollow construction in certain places. So we're starting to suspect, oh, maybe we have Baltimore's airport. Flip that type over and look at its footprint. The piece of type on the right is what a typical piece of metal foundry type looks like, with a groove across its foot. The piece on the right, however, has evidence of saw marks. Here's why you might find that. Type in the United States is cast at .918 of an inch in height so that it works on our printing presses. Type that was cast outside the U.S. and Europe was .928 of an inch, meaning to get it to work in the United States, you had to saw it down. So you didn't want to hurt the face, but you could certainly knock off an inch or two, not an inch, a couple of fragments of measurements on the feet. Now we're starting to think, do we quite possibly have the real future from Bauer in Europe? So we looked at the other type that exists in Stern and FaZe collection that we knew was manufactured by Bauer. One of those examples was Traffdin, which, according to Mac McGrew's book, was only produced by Bauer. So taking that knowledge, we looked at the feet, we compared it to what we thought was future and medium condensed. Sure enough, they both have saw blade marks on the bottom. We're starting to get a little bit more confident, so we look at the special characters in the typeface. It looks here like we might have an alternate version of the capital A, but when we looked at Mac McGrew's book, we couldn't find any evidence of that in Futura. But what we did find is that some European foundries would produce an FT ligature, which is not a common two character ligature that was produced here in the United States. So we pulled out the separate characters for those respective ligatures, paired them up to each other, and look at that. It looks like we might actually have an FT ligature there on the right. Now I'm getting really excited that maybe we have real of Futura in the collection. To give you an idea of how far into the weeds you can get on this, typefaces such as 20th century extra bold and Spartan black look incredibly a lot alike when they're sitting there in their galleys. And sometimes it came down to just looking at the apostrophes and identifying the differences between those two typefaces through that one single character. So in review, when you are looking to identify metal type, you might want to look at things that do not actually print in order to successfully identify it. It can tell you a lot. When we identified all the type and felt confident that we could change the names, we did so in the spreadsheet. However, we did leave a trail of breadcrumbs for ourselves. We made notes in our spreadsheet about what it had been previously identified as, and then we also put notes, again, in painter's tape, on the galleys and on the type cases themselves. McGrew would list his type out by weights, starting with Futura, and then give the corresponding weight in the other type foundry's names. This information was gold to me as I was working to identify and eliminate redundancy in the collection. I assigned a letter to each weight of the type starting with the lightest, and I moved through, up through medium, at which point we started to see condensed faces, but rather than give that condensed face its own letter, we simply doubled up so that we could understand that Spartan medium is related to Spartan medium condensed. When we get to the heavier weights, we start to see why, perhaps, there is some naming confusion in our system. You can see here that what 20th century calls bold, Futura might call demibold. Heavier weight from that 20th century refers to it as extra bold, but Baltimore airport is just bold. So bold, heavy, black, they start to really hold no water in our identification system. We get to the heaviest weight in Stern and Bay's collection, and we start to see extended weights. So, again, rather than giving those a new letter form in our organization, we just gave them triple letters. Finally, we had an example of Futura display. It's kind of its own category in and of itself, so I just gave the letter Z and just let it tuck to the end of my inventory. What this allowed me to do was to simply sort alphabetically, by weight class, all of the typefaces in the Futura collection by their weight, independent of their typeface name and of their foundry. This allowed me to see that Spartan medium condensed really was the same design weight as Futura medium condensed, and that the two of those were indeed lighter in weight than Spartan heavy. This is the hard part, setting the ground rules for figuring out what you remove from this carefully curated collection, and I want to make it clear our goal was not to have a representative of each type foundry and the different versions of Futura that they made, but rather to represent Futura as a whole in all of its different sizes. It's body weights, Roman and italics, and I throw the phrase be respectful up here, because this was a collection that was very near and dear to Chris Stern's heart and Jules Faye's heart, and you just don't go in and say I want this and I want that. If you're going to commit to being the steward of this type, you take it all as best you can. I am very proud to say that I am the steward of most of this type today. I have 55 out of the 65 cases of Futura. I have 76 out of 100 of the galleys totaling over 2900 pounds, which is literally over a ton of type, and it is not my only typeface, but it is my house sans serif typeface now. So where's the rest? I am very happy to say that Jules Faye is still kicking around in Mount Vernon, Washington as Stern and Faye printers. She has a letterpress print shop, she has a bindery, and she actually just recently acquired a new press from down here in Portland. The type foundry came down here to Oregon and became the CC Stern type foundry, which is the metal type museum that is open tomorrow from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. You can go see this typecasting in action. Six schools in Oregon and Washington State benefited from Stern and Faye printers, including the Oregon College of Art and Craft here in Portland. Finally, and this is most impressive, over 30 private presses in the Pacific Northwest were either started from or grew more robust through benefitting from equipment from Stern and Faye. Why do this? I can't emphasize enough how much work this was in a short period of time. I did not get paid, Jules did not get paid. It was a labor of love. I did this out of respect for my mentors who gave me a lot of time, a lot of energy to educate me. I wanted to honor their legacy and continue the work that was near and dear to Chris Stern's heart. It's a lot of fun to play with this type. The more you know it, the more likely you are to call upon it when you're working on design problems. I've had a lot of fun over the past few years keeping this in use for several different projects. It's a lot of fun to explore. It's kind of like playing a musical instrument and you learn all the different ways you can play it and it'll keep you busy for years to come. Finally, it's really important as letter press printers to preserve and share this equipment's history and its legacy for the generations to come. There is a time that this could have been lost. It was literally thrown into the water. People were paid to take it away. I am proud to say that people like me are making an effort to make sure its history is preserved for generations to come. If you work in a letterpress print shop or in a school or you know somebody that does and they have not yet started an inventory, I encourage you to go to my website amodepress.com and please download a template of the spreadsheet. You don't have to know everything about the type that you see up here on the screen. I've included details such as the type foundry, the type designer, the type style, even the provenance. In other words, who did you get the type from? Inventory spreadsheets like this will help preserve that history, get it out of people's heads, keep it out from just being word of mouth, and get it into the books so that librarians and others can help document it for many years to come. Thank you.