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https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/selling-the-victorians/

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Download documents and transcripts
Teachers' notes

This collection of Victorian advertisements is aimed at any teacher or student engaged in a local study of the Victorian period. The sources could be used to help provide a sense of period and show pupils the type of source material they might find in their local archive, museum or record office. The collection could be used alongside our Victorian Lives collection to give further insight into the Victorian home life.

These adverts explore how the Victorians cleaned their homes, what they ate and drank, how they had fun, and how they advertised the products they sold.

It would be useful for pupils to watch the video in our Victorians website before looking at the sources to get the most out of the questions and activities as well as looking at the general guidance questions below on how to evaluate and understand documents. Also included here are some questions with a specific literary focus on the language of advertising. Transcripts are also provided where necessary.

What type of document is it? (Letter, report, photograph or newspaper).

Can you find a date?

What is the document saying?

Check the meaning of any words you are unsure about.

What names appear in the document?

Does the document show the writer's opinions/values?

Are there any clues about the intended audience for the document?

Why was the document written?

Does it have any limitations?

Does it link to other documents in the group?

Does it share the same ideas, attitudes and arguments?

How would you explain any differences between these documents?

Teachers may want to break their class up into groups and get students to feed back on a selection of adverts and/or annotate them at the white board. Others may wish to engage pupils with these documents for an enquiry question on a particular theme, for example on the role of women, domestic service, food and drink or consumer culture.

Teachers can use the collection to develop their own resources or encourage students to 'curate' their own 'exhibition' of the most significant sources on the Victorian period. We have created a based on seven of these advertisements from this collection to demonstrate how the sources could be used in a flexible lesson activity.

Finally, for suggestions on how to carry out a local study use our video guidance in the Victorians website.

Tasks

External links

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Selling the Victorians - The National Archives

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https://aliseckin.com/blog/victorian-age-and-the-birth-of-advertising/

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Ali Seckin Karayol - Visual Communication and Interaction Designer

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Victorian Age and The Birth of Advertising

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In the mid to late 19th century, the technological change was a big driving force, just like today. The new inventions were deeply changing how people live and work. The change from an agrarian culture to the industrial culture defined the look and feel of design in Victorian Era.

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https://www.onlinedesignteacher.com/2016/05/graphic-design-styles.html?m=1

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Victorian Railways advertising 1910s to 1950s

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Victorian Railways advertising 1910s to 1950s

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Victorian Railways advertising 1910s to 1950s from The Sell exhibition

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A rich and accessible art form, our collection of pictoral posters charts global concerns, popular tastes and artistic and technological developments across two centuries.

The process of posting up hand-drawn public notices can be traced back to antiquity. One of the earliest known examples of printed advertising in Britain dates from 1477 - a small dark block of text advertising a handbook for priests in Salisbury, south-west England. The advert was printed by William Caxton, who introduced the printing press to Britain and was the first person in the country to make a living printing and selling books, having opened a shop near Westminster Abbey in 1476. By the 19th century, text-heavy posters printed from woodblocks were commonplace, but the rise of the colourful pictorial poster didn't come about until the middle of the century, following significant advances in printing techniques.

The pioneering French poster artist Jules Chéret (1836 - 1932) is credited with producing the first colour lithograph posters in 1866, having finessed the black and white process invented by Alois Senefelder in 1798. In lithographic printing, the design is drawn in waxy crayon onto a smooth surface, typically limestone blocks (later metal plates) which are then doused with water and covered with an oil-based ink. The waxy drawn areas repel the water and soak up the ink, before being transferred to the paper. Most posters are still printed lithographically with a mechanised offset process, where the image is transferred from a metal plate onto a rubber roller before being printed.

Perfecting large-scale colour printing had eluded artists for decades until Chéret made the breakthrough with a three-stone process and relatively transparent inks. He broke the design down into individual colours, which were drawn onto separate stones, and then overlaid in the printing process. Chéret also incorporated hand-drawn lettering which led to innovative and original typography and a more unified design overall. His posters had a lightness and sense of movement which captivated the public imagination and led to comparisons with decorative painters of the previous century, such as Tiepolo, master of the European Rococo style.

Other artists shook off these historical comparisons and experimented with more contemporary ways to depict the modern world. Toulouse-Lautrec remains the best-known name from this French heyday of the 'art' poster, although his style - part-caricature, part-realism - was widely criticised at the time.

Over the decades that followed, designers from around the world followed suit in experimenting with poster design. The Art Nouveau style, popularised by Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, took the poster world by storm and inspired other national variants. The US also had its own Art Nouveau poster artists such as William H. Bradley and Edward Penfield, both very much inspired by the clean and sinuous lines of the British artist Aubrey Beardsley.

Gradually, the excessive ornamentation of Art Nouveau was abandoned in favour of more angular Art Deco designs, a style which marvelled at technological innovations such as cruise ships and high-speed trains, as in the work of A.M. Cassandre, Edward McKnight Kauffer and Vera Willoughby, for example.

The Russian Constructivists revolutionised the poster using photo-montage and bold geometric forms in the 1920s, following the onslaught of poster propaganda that had been generated during the First World War. Their arresting style spread through the Communist world, influencing the poster output of Revolutionary Spain in the 1930s as well as Chinese and Cuban graphic design for several decades.

Many of the lessons learned about the power of the poster during the two World Wars went on to inform the burgeoning advertising industry and, in Britain, the birth of the welfare state. The 1950s saw a boom in illustrative posters as well as a renewed focus on textual posters. The rise of the International Typographic Style, developed in Switzerland, introduced sans-serif fonts characterised by simple geometry and uncluttered clarity.

In the 1960s, the motifs and mannerisms of Art Nouveau were recycled to create psychedelic graphics. Groups such as Michael English and Nigel Waymouth's 'Hapshash and the Coloured Coat' experimented with the rich intensity of silkscreen colour, while in America, the San Francisco 'Big Five' psychedelic poster designers (Rick Griffin, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, and Wes Wilson) largely continued with lithography. This visual dynamism was also advanced in Poland in the 1960s and 70s, with a strong school of poster artists designing for cinema and the arts, pulling together distinctive Surrealist elements and a vibrant colour palette.

In the 1980s, artists and activist collectives such as Gran Fury and Keith Haring in the US harnessed the power of the poster as a tool of mass communication and community building to promote awareness during the global AIDS crisis. These posters provide a lens on the varying degrees of tolerance and support at the peak of the crisis, embodying a sense of urgency, and capturing the zeitgeist of 1980s and 90s graphic design.

Running parallel to this was a trend in commercial advertising towards increasingly controversial imagery. Clothing brand United Colors of Benetton appropriated documentary photographs of AIDS patients on their death-beds and the blood-soaked clothing of Bosnian war victims in order to sell their products. Designed to whip up a media frenzy, these campaigns also played with poster advertising as a platform for confronting political issues and exposing social prejudices.

In the digital age, the rise of the internet meme - an image or piece of text that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users - can be seen as the digital descendent of the poster. While the poster no longer dominates today's media environment, it continues to have a powerful impact, perhaps most critically in the realm of politics and activism. Darren Cullen's 2018 poster Great War brings the story full circle by parodying a famous First World War army recruitment poster from 1915, Daddy, What did YOU do in the Great War?. Marking the centenary of the end of the War, Cullen's design critiques the senselessness of warfare and the continued use of emotional blackmail in army recruitment poster campaigns.

Find out more with our book, The Poster: A Visual History.

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Our collection of pictoral posters charts global concerns, popular tastes and artistic and technological developments across two centuries.

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Just like today, technology was a driving force in the late 19th century, and due to this fact peoples lives changed as there was an increase in industrialization more than agricultural. This meant that mass production of items was happening.

In those days people used to make handmade crockery such as teapots and cups, this meant that each and every house had no identical teapot. Things had changed in the victorian times and now not only teapots looked the same but they also came in different shapes and colours like never before.

Due to the surge of people wanting to buy new things, competition started to arise and this is where graphic design is involved. In order to compete manufactures were creating posters, leaflets and pocket cards to convince their consumers to buy their product and not the one down the street.

At the same time new machines for printing were being invented this meant that print was now finer which lead to greater power and creativity when it comes to advertising and graphic design. The posters being created were very positive, this can be seen from the orderly placed images and text and vivid colours. This was done because people were enjoying the new ways of technology and the victorians were in the midst of it.

References
VICTORIAN ADVERTISING | History of Advertising. 2014. VICTORIAN ADVERTISING | History of Advertising . [ONLINE] Available at: http://historyofads.the-voice.com/http:/historyofads.the-voice.com/advertising/victorian-advertising. [Accessed 29 December 2014].

Victorian era - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 2014. Victorian era - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [ONLINE] Available at:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_era#Culture. [Accessed 29 December 2014].

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Just like today, technology was a driving force in the late 19th century, and due to this fact peoples lives changed as there was an increase in industrialization more than agricultural. This meant...

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http://www.designhistory.org/Poster_pages/Braodsides.html

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Printed on one side only, broadsides are used to issue public decrees, governmental notifications and a host of commercial and private announcements. Early broadsides were quickly and crudely produced in large quantities and distributed freely in town squares, taverns, and churches. Some were sold by itinerate salesman, or chapmen, for a nominal charge.

Broadsides were intended to have an immediate impact and then to be discarded. Items printed for short term consumption are referred to as printed ephemera. Posters grew more sophisticated as printing technologies and artistic movements evolved. Illustrators and graphic designers were afforded a medium for public artistic expression while promoting the products of their client. Many type faces, specifically drawn to compliment illustrations, inspired new metal type.

Immensely popular and affordable, posters were made available to the general public who purchased them to display in their homes. While in the 18th and 19th centuries most urban areas had public spaces allotted for posters, today there is increasingly less space available for posting broadsides.

A Need for Large Type

Broadsides were meant to be read from a distance and therefore required large type. Metal type could not be cast much larger than an inch and still retain the flat surface required for letterpress relief printing. Twelve line pica ( explained here) was the largest size feasible in metal type but in actual practice wood type was used for larger sizes. The image above is a sample from the Bruce's New York Foundry specimen book of 1869 available for on-line viewing at this link. I highly recommended looking at this or other specimen books of that era to appreciate the variety of type available to designers.

There were a number of negative factors of large metal type, it was expensive, required a large amount of storage space, and was extremely heavy-just try lifting a case of this type!

If a printer did have a collection of large metal type, it was likely that they didn't have enough letters in the same face to set many words so type styles were mixed and matched depending on what was in the shop collection. As illustrated (on the Lincoln poster, above right and images below) wooden type was often mixed with metal type in a conglomeration of styles.

Wooden Type

Commercial pressure for large type was answered with the invention of a system for wood type production. In 1827 Darius Wells (1800-1875) invented a special wood drill, the lateral router, capable of cutting letters on type-high end-cut wood blocks. The router was used in combination with William Leavenworth's pantograph (1834) to create decorative wooden letters of all sizes and shapes. In 1880 James Hamilton developed a method of adhering a veneer made of holly wood onto a pine base. Within a decade he converted to the standard end-cut method. (Thanks to David Shields

Visit the Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection here.
Rob Roy Kelly (1925-2004) was a designer and educator who researched and collected 19th century American wood type. His oeuvre is held at the University of Texas at Austin where a wonderful on-line resource is waiting for you to peruse.

Lithographic Posters

The process of lithography depends on the mutual repulsion of grease and water. It was invented by Alois Senefelder in 1796 as he searched for an alternative process to expensive metal plate engraving. His method involved drawing with a greasy crayon onto finely surfaced Bavarian limestone and offsetting that image onto paper. In later commercial applications metal plates were used.

This direct process captures the artist's true intention, however the final printed image is in reverse. The images and lettering needed to be drawn backwards, often reflected in a mirror or traced backwards on a transfer paper. A distinct advantage of lithography was the ability to hand draw letters, opening the field of type design to endless styles.

Two great visuals on how lithography works:
YouTube movie explanation of lithography Animated explanation of lithography at the MOMA

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Printed on one side only, broadsides are used to issue public decrees, governmental notifications and a host of commercial and private announcements. Early broadsides were quickly and crudely produced in large quantities and distributed freely in town squares, taverns, and churches. Some were sold by itinerate salesman, or chapmen, for a nominal charge.

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https://www.typography.com/blog/a-treasury-of-wood-type-online

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A Treasury of Wood Type Online | Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

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image_1} The Hamilton Manufacturing Co. traces its roots back to the very first wood types made in the United States. Darius Wells produced the first American wood type in 1828; his business was reorganized into Wells & Webb, then acquired by William Page, later passing back to the Wells family, and finally sold to Hamilton sometime before 1880.

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Printing wood type posters at Typoretum | Wood type poster, Type posters, Prints

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Feb 24, 2014 - Justin Knopp printing wood type posters at Typoretum, on an antique Wharfedale cylinder press

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Intro to Typography: Victorian Wood Type advertising (aka the Wanted poster style)

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The Collections: The Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection

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Any day celebrating the book, World Book Day or National Read A Book Day, is to be celebrated with the best (typographic related if possible) books the world has to offer. Enter Rob Roy Kelly's "American Wood Type: 1828-1900 - Notes on the Evolution of Decorated and Large Types".

This massive tome of inspiration and nostalgia is the first and most authoritative history of wood type in the United States. The book tells the complete story of wood type, beginning with the history of wood as a printing material, the development of decorated letters and large letters, and the invention of machinery for mass-producing wood letters.

The 19th-century heyday of wood type is explored in great detail, including all aspects of design, manufacture, and marketing, and the evolution of styles. Many related trades interacted with wood type production; the book examines the influence of lithography, letterpress, metal-plate and wood engraving, sign painting and calligraphy, poster printing, and type-founding. Long out of print, the book is still regarded by scholars and designers as an invaluable resource for a rich legacy of typographic art. More than 600 specimens of wood type are classified and annotated, as are more than 100 specimens of complete fonts.

The book, first published in 1969, has been reissued in 2016 with a new foreword by David Shields, then Design Curator of the Rob Roy Kelly Wood Type Collection at the University of Texas at Austin, discussing the renewed interest in the subject since the mid-1990s as well as ongoing research into the history of wood type.

The Rob Roy Kelly Wood Type Collection is a comprehensive collection of wood type, comprised of nearly 150 faces of various sizes and styles. Rob Roy Kelly (1925-2004) the noted design educator, collector, and historian began gathering the types in the late 1950s and continued adding to the collection through the mid-1960s.

His decade-long research project culminated in the publication of " American Wood Type, 1828-1900: Notes on the Evolution of Decorated and Large Types and Comments on Related Trades of the Period", which remains today to the preeminent history of wood type.

Last November Shields gave a talk in the Rose Auditorium at The Cooper Union as part of the Type@Cooper Program. David Shields is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Graphic Design at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and he is currently focusing his research on 19th century typographic form and visual culture arising from investigations of Rob Roy Kelly's American Wood Type Collection.

He keeps a slow blog of his research at Wood Type Research (woodtyperesearch.com).

Read the book, watch the talk, do whatever you like, but do fall in love with American Wood Type as much as we do.

Rob Roy Kelly: A bottle of Scotch for two cases of wood type with David Shields from Type@Cooper on Vimeo.

Images via Amazon

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World Book Day 2019: Rob Roy Kelly's American Wood Type is a treasure to behold - TypeRoom

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Any day celebrating the book, World Book Day or National Read A Book Day, is to be celebrated with the best (typographic related if possible) books the world has to offer. Enter Rob Roy Kelly's &...

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The Proliferation of 19th- (and 20th-) Century Wood Type

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The Proliferation of 19th- (and 20th-) Century Wood Type

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The Proliferation of 19th- (and 20th-) Century Wood Type and Its Impact on Typographic Norms - Letterform Archive

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“…running from one falling star to another…” (Kerouac, 1957) Throughout the nineteenth (and early twentieth) century the proliferation of wood type played an integral role in the creation of American…

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The amazing Leeds Playbills website contains nearly 5,000 medium-to-high resolution scans of vibrant playbills dating from the late 1700s up through the 1990s. The database, part of the Leodis digitization project, represents all the playbills in the Local Studies Library collection, with samples from a variety of historic theatres in the city of Leeds, as well as a group of related circus bills. Interestingly, the project is funded by the UK National Lottery's Big Lottery Fund (formerly the New Opportunities Fund).

Many of the prints showcase an impressive array of large and ornamented types. Not surprisingly, the circus bills are among the most vibrant on the site, many utilizing multiple colors with chromatic typefaces, illustrations, and sensationalist prose. There are also a few non-typographic lithographs with elaborately colored lettering and illustration.

Other than the obvious wow factor (!!!), the prints are interesting for several typo-historic reasons. First of all, they show many typefaces that aren't seen as frequently on this side of the Atlantic, and perhaps even in the UK. Furthermore, it shows the type in real-world use (not as in self conscious type specimens), revealing how the printers organized the information through variations in letter style and layout. One advantage of the higher resolution enlargements is that you can get a sense of how much care was put in to the printing of each piece (the range is wide). Many of the bills also have a credit line citing which print shop ran the job, allowing an evaluation of each shop in comparison with others, and giving info about which venues employed which printers. Finally, some of the items give an interesting view in to the practice of updating information by pasting on additional slips of paper or overprinting.

Unfortunately the small thumbnail images make browsing a bit tedious, and some of the full-resolution images show streaking from faulty scanning equipment. The site does have some useful functionality though, including the ability to filter content according to dates, keywords, and venues.

While wide time range is represented, the most interesting material to me, typographically, is that from the mid-to-late 1800s - coincidentally also the same period in which wood type was at its height of production and use. I've compiled a collection of details from some of the more interesting samples below, each linked back to the original page where you can access an enlarged, un-cropped, view.

It's getting to be a bit late for holiday gift suggestion lists, but I figured I'd do one of wood type / decorative lettering wares. Many of these items have been shown elsewhere, and the list is nowhere near complete, but it's a good starting point. With that said, here are a few suggestions...

Greeting cards from RIT

I'll start with a topic very close to my heart: the book Specimens of Chromatic Wood Type, Borders, &c., Manufactured by Wm. H. Page & Co... This mind-blowing object, published in 1874, is something that I have much, much, much, more to talk about than I will go in to now. Instead, in the interest of time, I'll just note a great set of greeting cards published by the RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press that feature scaled-down reproductions from the book.

Also available are similar cards featuring reproductions from a great French lettering manual, Nouvel Album de Letters Peintes.

You might as well check out all the cool stuff that the press sells related to printing history. It's a great source of cheap but awesome gifts.

Both sets of 4.25″ × 6″ cards are sold in packs of 8 - 2 each of 4 designs, with envelopes. I've purchased several batches myself over the past few years.

☛ $7 from the RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press

Wood type monogram coasters

There are tons of products available online that are printed using wood type (I'll show some more below). The thing I personally like about this set of coasters from Marquand Books is that the type isn't intentionally "distressed", as is so common with many similar products. Instead, the letters are printed cleanly in solid black.

I can't say that I would ever really use my own set of hand-printed coasters; but whatever, it's wood type!

They also offer some wood type doorknob hangers, but I like the coasters much better myself.

The 3.5″ square coasters come in a nice little packaged set of 9 - 3 each of 3 colors (orange, green, and blue).

☛ $8.50 from Marquand Books

Decorative lettering bags

Similar to the cards show above, this bag from Blue Q reproduces alphabets from beautifully colored French chromolithograph lettering samples. Unfortunately it's sold without any proper credit to the original source, but I think it might be from Modeles de Lettres, 1884.

Blue Q also has the cool HI/BYE shoulder bag featuring decorative lettering by the talented Ray Fenwick.

Both bags are made with recycled woven polypropylene.

☛ $11.99 / $9.99 (respectively) from Blue Q

2010 calendar

This calendar was printed by Allen Stump at his a Mano Press. Calendars are great for end-of-year gifts, but they're ten times better if printed with the same wood type collection I encountered on my visit with Allen over the summer.

There are other worthy items from the a Mano Press available on their Etsy shop.

The wirebound caledars are 12½″ square, printed in multiple colors on a pair of Vandercooks.

☛ $20 from the a Mano Press on Etsy

PLINC Eventide M print

House Industries has been doing some great stuff with the prestigious library of Photo-Lettering Inc since they acquired the materials in 2003. One highlight of such work is this silkscreen-printed poster featuring a chromatic glyph from PLINC's Eventide alphabet, originally designed by Paul Carlyle, digitized by Jeremy Mickel, and printed on this poster by hand with metallic inks by David Dodde.

The hand-numbered 26″ × 20″ poster is printed on 130# acid-free cover weight paper. I picked up a copy for myself when House was selling them at the TDC recently.

☛ $40 from House Industries

Daily Drop Cap poster

The first alphabet of Jessica Hische's Daily Drop Cap project that I wrote about previously has found its way on to a poster.

The 15″ × 22″ poster is an archival Giclee print on Velvet Fine Art paper and comes signed by Jessica.

☛ $100 from Jessica Hische

POP! Goes The Weasel poster print

For people looking for kid-related gifts, this poster from Richard Ardagh and New North Press shows three variations of the traditional nursery rhyme, each set in a variety of 19th-century display type styles.

They made a video showing the process of printing the posters, accompanied with an endearingly British singsong take on the rhyme.

There are a few other prints offered from the same collaboration that are worth checking out too.

The 560 mm × 760 mm (≈22″ × 30″) poster was hand-set and printed in an edition of 200.

☛ £75 from New North Press

Marquee alphabet lights

We enter a higher price bracket with these large-scale lighted marquee letters from Urban Outfitters. I promote this item somewhat begrudgingly since I'm not particularly a fan of some of the practices of Urban Outfitters. However, these letters are too cool to leave out and I couldn't find any info about how to get them otherwise.

The particular shape of serifs used for these letters designate them as being of a "mansard" style. William Page patented and sold wood fonts of this style in 1879 as "№ 121", but a thorough history requires more details than I'll go in to here.

The metal letters vary in width from character to character, but are all 24″ high × 4″ deep.

☛ $178 from Urban Outfitters

Alpha Coffee Table

I don't have any expectation that anyone will actually buy this after reading about it here, but I include it for the sake of relevance. The top of this table from Crate & Barrel is composed of wood type - or, actually, a solid piece of wood that's been carved, painted, and finished to make it look like wood type. According to the product description, the table was designed by "a London graphic designer with a penchant for, and a large personal collection of, antique printers' blocks". I can't say I know who that is, but if I don't know them already, they sound like someone I could have a good conversation with.

The table has a steel base and glass top that covers the letters; it measures 36″ wide × 36″ deep × 17″ high.

☛ $599 (on sale from $899!) from Crate & Barrel

Alphabet Drawers

Also in the realm of things I know people will think is cool but won't actually ever buy is this big chest of wood type inspired drawers from Kent & London. In fact, there's a good chance you may have already seen this on design and type blogs already, but I'm including it here for its notable relevance.

The letter style used on the front of each drawer approximates one offered in wood type by a huge number of manufacturers, most of them calling it, simply, " Gothic ". Similar to the "mansard" mentioned above, a whole article could be written about this style, but I'll refrain for now.

The solid oak chest measures 800 mm high × 1200 mm wide × 300mm deep (≈32″ × 47″ × 12″)

☛ £2,700 from Kent & London

Support the Hamilton Wood Type Museum

Coming back to the real world... if conspicuous consumption and material possessions aren't your thing, you can always take the charity route and support this deserving organization on someone else's behalf.

Membership to the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum is available on a number of levels which include things that you can wrap and give to people if you want, like digital fonts, printed specimen sheets, books, shirts, etc. Members also get reduced studio rental cost incentives.

If you aren't the membership kind of gift giver, the museum also sells a variety of other wood type products.

☛ Various member levels are available from the Hamilton Museum

Help restore the Gastrotypographicalassemblage

Another charity gift option is to help fund the restoration of Lou Dorfsman's amazing wall of lettering. I won't go in to much detail describing it here (I'm hoping to do a related report at some point in the future), but this piece of wood type-ish design is more than worthy of the care and restoration that the Center for Design Study is working towards giving it.

This short interview with Dorfsman gives a good idea about what you'd be helping to preserve.

☛ Donations of any size can be made to the Center for Design Study

Yee-Haw wood type prints

I'll end this list of gift ideas with the items I'd like the most... This series of 3 specimen posters ( 1, 2, 3) was printed by Yee-Haw Industries and features a huge variety of wood type faces. I saw all 3 of the prints at Yee-Haw's Chelea market show in October, and have been wanting them ever since. They definitely aren't cheap, but after having printed a similar specimen poster myself over the summer, I can fully appreciate the amount of work it takes to produce something like this. These images definitely don't do the prints proper justice, but I'll show them all regardless.

Yee-Haw has tons of other wood type stuff in their Etsy store (18 pages worth!), so definitely check that out as well.

Also, if you're in the New York City area this month, Yee-Haw will be up from their home in Knoxville to sell stuff at a bunch of different craft fairs, flea markets, etc, including a pop-up shop at Chelsea Market (where their show is still up). Instead of repeating all the details, I'll just direct you to their official announcement.

The color posters above are printed 2-color on 30″ × 42″ archival acid-free 100% cotton paper with deckled edges.

Please buy me all of them.

☛ $500 each from Yee-Haw Industries on Etsy

I could keep going with more suggestions, but this list is already too long. If you're left still wanting more, try a search on Etsy for "wood type" and you're bound to find something good. Please feel free to share any other suggestions you might have in the comments.

Happy holidays!

Director Justine Nagan is now putting the finishing touches on , a feature-length documentary film about the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum. The film is a production of Chicago-based Kartemquin FIlms (of Hoop Dreams fame).

I designed and printed a poster last year (pictured above) to promote the film and help raise money for the production; I've also done some advising on rough edits of the film. Justine and the team working on the documentary are dedicated and skilled filmmakers (not to mention great all-around people), and the edits I've seen so far are very promising. After having spent much time at Hamilton, I anxiously look forward to a broader public release to help spread the word about the museum.

To get info about when and where to see the film (including a screening next week in Atlanta!), buy limited-edition posters, read news updates and info on the project, and more, see the official Typeface site.

I received a packet in the mail the other day from Mr. Alan Brignull of the Hedgehog Press, Wivenhoe, Essex, England. The parcel, whose exterior bore samples of Alan's calligraphy and masterfully printed artistamps, contained some pieces from the Hedgehog Press' Rambling Urchin series of postcard-sized keepsakes, including the one pictured above.

Other than the fact that it was beautifully printed, I wanted to feature this specific card because it speaks perfectly to the focus of this newly founded journal - indeed in form, but more importantly in content, by introspectively pondering the mystique of wood type (or "woodletter" if you prefer a more British tongue).

... And besides, what's not to love about something that uses a term like "Vandercookery"?

Alan sent the prints after coming across a poster I printed a few months earlier which employed similar red/blue wood type overprinting (apparently great minds do think alike!). It wasn't the first keepsake he's been generous enough to send me, and with any luck won't be the last.

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The amazing Leeds Playbills website contains nearly 5,000 medium-to-high resolution scans of vibrant playbills dating from the late 1700s up through the 1990s. The database, part of the Leodis digitization project, represents all the playbills in the Local Studies Library collection, with samples from a variety of historic theatres in the city of Leeds, as well as a group of related circus bills.