Type Styles 

Wolverine Press is a letterpress publisher owned and staffed by the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, and housed by MLibrary. When we say we are a “letterpress” publisher, this is what we are talking about. These are our letters.

(A note on terms: metal printing types are also called letters. The design of any given set of letters is called its “type face”. A “font” is a particular unit of type of a specific face. “Font” in this context is synonymous with “quantity”, and is derived from the word “fount” from which we get the word “fountain”. In the very old days a printer would say that he had a “100lb fount of letters, as cut by Mr. Baskerville”, and by that he meant he had 100lbs of Baskerville type. The word ‘fount’ here is evocative of the fact that type is cast from molten lead, the original printers did their own casting, and were therefore intimately familiar with the idea that all of the metal letters in their shop were essentially liquid, and would ultimately be re-melted and re-cast for future use. Thus, a fount of letters.)

Schriftlettern: sorts. This is basically what a single piece of type looks like.

When Johann Gutenberg invented “the printing press” in 1439 what he really invented was a comprehensive technical system for printing. A press without type is of little value, and the process for casting re-useable and re-arrangeable metal letters, called “moveable type”, was the centerpiece of Gutenberg’s “secret”.

Wolverine Press was born in our type. The idea for the whole operation arose, in part, because of the passing of hobbyist printer John Moran, of Muskegon, Michigan. John left behind an extremely well-cared for and well-ordered collection of type, and the purchase of that collection of 129 cases (plus the cabinets that hold those cases) forms the core of our 205 case collection. The purchase from the Moran estate has since been supplemented with generous donations from University of Michigan Alums Richard Campbell (’79), Quick Carlson (’49) and Richard Leary (’61) as well as retired Art School faculty member Wesley Tanner. We’ve also added to the collection by casting some of our type, working with American Typecasting Fellowship member Phil Driscoll.

A case of type at Wolverine Press. Each letter gets its own box in the case.

Here are three of my favorites from the collection.

Caslon

Our large collection of Caslon (specifically American Type Founders Caslon 471, and ATF Caslon 540) was donated by printer Wesley Tanner.

Caslon is sometimes called “The Oldest Living Typeface”. William Caslon, an engraver of gun locks, decided in the 1720s that he would cut letters in England. Before Caslon, English printing was dominated by continental letters.

A print of our Caslon Collection. Every line here was handset by Kat Finch. Even the teeny tiny ones.

Caslon (the founder and the type) was a HUGE commercial success in the 18th century. The 18th Century was dominated first by Caslon, and then later by other English and Scottish Type foundries that essentially copied Caslon. The Caslon Letter (even when it was Wilson’s letter, say, or some other Founder’s Letter) became the letter of the British Empire. In America, the Declaration of Independence was set in Caslon. When Ben Franklin set up his first print shop, he bought all his letters from the Caslon Foundry (a literal solid TON of the stuff). And so the success of Caslon established his letter as OUR founding letter.

When you look at Caslon, as an American, you see Poor Richard’s Almanack, and you see the Massachusetts SPY, and you see Live Free or Die, and Don’t Tread on Me. You see our earliest money, and our earliest slavery auction broadsides. You see America.

There is only one Caslon. He’s our Caslon.

Famously George Bernhard Shaw, on the advice of William Morris, insisted that all of his writings only be set in Caslon. By the 1920s Caslon had become so indispensable to good book design that it was common for designers to say, “When in doubt, use Caslon.”

Caslon’s deep history and authenticity gave rise to the typographic superstition that, “A lie cannot be told in Caslon.”

We most recently put this type to use printing a selection from HAMLET for the UM Library.

Kennerley Old Style

A specimen of our Kennerley type. A type specimen is a printing of every character in the typeface. When we cast our large font of Kennerley Old Style, it was fun to show off all of the special extras we had with the set. And since the first casting, we have added several different European Accent sets, making this a very versatile collection.

In January 1908, Frederic Goudy watched his young business, The Village Press, burn. The police held Goudy back as his printing presses crashed through six fiery floors.

“They didn’t let me go to my own fire,” Goudy said later. A decade of type designs were destroyed. Goudy was forced to start over, doing freelance illustrations for advertisements.

In 1911, the publisher Mitchell Kennerley came to Goudy with The Door in the Wall by H.G. Wells. Goudy persuaded Kennerley to not use the nearly 200-year-old Caslon type, which could be readily purchased from a dozen different foundries. Instead, Goudy wanted to design a new typeface.

Kennerley, the typeface that resulted, was an instant American Classic. Goudy had spent years studying the letter designs of the earliest 15th century printers, the medieval scribes, and the inscriptions of Rome. His letter designs were always infused with the human irregularity of calligraphy. But what makes Kennerley so special is that unlike most of Goudy’s previous, incinerated work, he did not base these letters on any specific ancient model. The Kennerley letters were Goudy’s. They were infused with history and humanity, but they were new.

In this sense, they are quintessentially American.

We cast 100 lbs of Kennerley with Phil Driscoll.

The Linotype. Phil has lots of amazing machines!

We used this to set and print “Composition” by Nicholas Delbanco in honor of his retirement after many years of service to the University.

Futura

After WWI, Germany was at a cultural crossroads. On the one side were the conservative movements characterized by the NAZIs and others who wanted to sink into the past, and “re”build a semi-mythical German empire. On the other, there were the future-oriented Germans, often artists, who the NAZIs would come to call Cultural Bolsheviks. In this group we found the Bauhaus movement, and designers like Paul Renner.

Germany at the beginning of the 20th Century was an outlier in printing because it was the last region in Europe to still use the blackletter type face as its printing standard. This fractured medieval letter, now the typeface used for diplomas and heavy metal album covers, is aggressively atavistic. And so it was natural that as the politics of regression were heating up in Germany, the politics of typography would become a (small) focal point.

All of our Futura cases in one cabinet. When you pull down the font menu in Word, and you drag through sizes and weights of different fonts, it makes type seem effortless, even thoughtless. But each case here is ONE size in ONE weight. When we want to switch, we have to lift out a case that weighs at least 20 lbs.

It was in this context that Paul Renner designed Futura, known now as a “geometric” typeface because of the mathematical precision used in its design. The O, the G and the C are all based on perfect circles, the E, the F and the T are based on exact half-squares. Before this period, virtually all letterforms in typography were derived from the shapes the scribes could make with a quill pen. The serifs of standard roman letters come from the sweep of the pen as it finishes the stroke, and the Baroque density of lines found in the blackletter typefaces are all derived from the complex squiggles of scribes from 1000 years before. But Renner sat down with a compass, protractor and a straight edge and produced an alphabet that sought to transcend history, to be distinct from it.

Futura, though designed in 1927, would go on to live up to its name. It was the typeface Stanley Kubrick used for the main titles on 2001: a space odyssey, and it was the typeface NASA used on the plaque Neil Armstrong placed on the moon.

It was the typeface that the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) would use as the titling face on the formal printing of THE PORT HURON STATEMENT (1964), written by University of Michigan student Tom Hayden.

Ikea and Crayola both use it as the letter for their respective wordmarks because of its neutrality. Futura’s success would pave the way for the ascendancy of the san serif letterforms in late 20th century design.

We have 22 cases of Futura, all from John Moran. Our Caslon and Kennerley collections work well as body texts, but I think titling should contrast strongly with body text. Titling in printing is like the frame of a painting, and I think it should be neutral, so that we can focus on the main work. Futura became the frame for Wolverine Press. We use it to title our pieces, we use it as our lettermark (WP) and for our wordmark (Wolverine Press).

Here is an example of our wordmark set in two different sizes of Futura Bold. We’ve printed these on a promo card featuring Harlan Hatcher, 8th president of the university.

There are 26 letters in the English alphabet, 77 characters total in a standard fount of type. With judicious re-arrangement we might set and print everything the human heart has yet conceived. They called it The Art Preservative of all Arts. And it is so.

By Fritz Swanson, director of the Wolverine Press.