the culture & craft of wood type

Over the past year, we have been researching the culture and craft of wood type. Wood type was invented in China in or around 1040 CE. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that it began to be widely used in the West, primarily for advertising and poster printing.

It was Darius Wells, working in New York City, who first began to mass produce wood type, using a lateral router. In 1834, William Leavenworth introduced the pantograph to his wood type manufacturing business in Allentown, New Jersey, allowing letters and other designs to be reproduced from a pattern. Wood type is generally larger than metal type, since lead type over 72pt (roughly an inch) is difficult and expensive to use — and painfully heavy!

Wood type manufacturers in the US, Britain, and Europe produced a huge variety of designs and alphabets, including Cyrillic, Burmese, German blackletter, Hebrew and Chinese pictograms.

Our project, funded by the World Wood Day Foundation, engages primarily with wood type made in the UK. It is inspired by two elements of our collection, each of which has a fascinating history.

ORPHANS

Thin Ice Press: the York Centre for Print is home to an impressively large collection of wood type, most of which was produced by Joyce & Co, a London-based company. The type was originally owned by the Orphans Printing Press in Leominster.

Henry Stanley Newman, a Quaker and philanthropist, opened the Leominster Orphan Home on 20th August 1869. In 1873, Newman rented a large warehouse and formed Orphans Printing Press. His idea was to train the orphaned children in a useful trade, and, at the same time, generate income to help fund the orphanage. Orphans Press survives today as a printing and web design company.

Our wood type tells a fascinating history of community, but also recounts a more uneasy story of child labour, Victorian philanthropy and colonial ambition: Newman was an active missionary, most notably to India.

A small corner of our wood type collection!

delittle of york

DeLittle of York, founded as the R. D. DeLittle “Eboracum” Letter Factory in 1888, was a major manufacturer of wood type, and the last wood type manufacturer in the UK, closing its doors in the late 1980s. Jim DeLittle created a unique pantograph, which allowed letters to be cut in two sizes at once from a single pattern.

When the firm finally closed its doors, much of the DeLittle collection went to The Type Archive in Stockwell, which had a mission to preserve the machinery and skills of type manufacture and printing in the UK. Sadly, The Type Archive has now closed, but we are delighted to have created a new home for key elements of the collection, including a beautiful office that once sat in the corner of the Vine Street factory, and a unique pantograph.

You can visit Robert “Jim” DeLittle’s beautiful handcrafted desk and chair in our premises at Peasholme Green.

As part of our work investigating the collections, Dr Sallie Morris of The Type Archive has made an exciting discovery of day books and other paper records that were believed to have been lost in a factory fire in 1950.

The DeLittle story is one of local community, but also of international commerce. Their first customer was F. T. Wimble & Co, a printing ink manufacturer and printing machinery distributor in Melbourne, Australia, and DeLittle went on to create typefaces including Cyrillic, Gaelic, Tamil and Sinhalese, as well as the ‘Empire’ border and the distinctive ‘white letter’ Eboracum face, named after Roman York.

project aims

Over the coming months, we will be wrapping up our pilot project and sharing more of our findings. We aim to explore wood type as a means to communicate, interpret and influence culture. What were the aesthetics of wood type? How did it change advertising and consumer culture? Where else did wood type have an impact?

We want to study wood type as an expression of culture in its own right, influenced by social, aesthetic and economic factors. What typefaces became popular? What do the ever more elaborate designs of wood type tell us about the tastes and priorities of their moment? And how can we think about the cultures of wood type manufacturing, including the tight-knit worlds of the DeLittle factory, Joyce & Co, and the Orphans Press?

From the local to the global. Or rather to the place where the local and global flow in and out of one another! We aim to foreground wood type’s complex relations to global and local cultures, including the ecologies and colonial and postcolonial histories of the wood used in manufacture and the resulting type. Where did the wood come from? And where did it go?

Last but not least, we want to make a practice-led contribution to contemporary culture, contributing directly to the revival and sustainability of wood type manufacture in the UK, and the associated letterpress printing revival, and leading to new creative work. Watch this space for details of Nick and Lizzy’s fantastic trip to learn type cutting at the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum, Two Rivers, Wisconsin, and to learn about Mark McKellier’s brilliant and inventive creative residency on our project.

A scene from Mark McKellier’s workshops at Thin Ice Press: the York Centre for Print.