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What
kind of man would spend his last dime on a heap of moldering
obsolete printing equipment while his children run about in burlap smocks?
The kind who never met a font of nineteenth century type he didn’t
like, that’s who! I started off in the 1970’s as a hand papermaker and letterpress printer, and somewhere along the way I left it behind as I slid downward into the seamy underworld of editorial illustration. But I never forgot my roots, and in 1994 I picked up a small table top press, and a few fonts of ancient wood type from an old printer in the circus town of Peru, Indiana.
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I thought it might be fun to print a couple of Christmas cards now and then – but I had no interest in becoming a printer again, no sir! Well,
it’s a slippery slope – it wasn’t long before I had
accumulated three antique presses, close to 400 fonts of nineteenth century
wood type, and three times that much lead type, plus a big pile of miscellaneous
rusty, dangerous equipment. I’ve done display typography for book covers, ads, and magazines like Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, Biography, and Real Simple. I
also use the presses to print replica period posters and other ephemera
for movie props. Although most of my type
is 19th century, many people are surprised to discover that they are the
original models of a lot of contemporary digital fonts, so not all of
my work looks like an old wanted poster.
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