Snow Day

Letter Perfect

above and below, two dramatically different Journal covers by the (Brooklyn!) master penman William E. Dennis (1860-1924).

Volumetric, constructed lettering with elaborate shadowing had its heyday in the 1890s to early 1900s.
Beautiful examples were found on stock certificates and maps (see BibliOdyssey for a collection of Sanborn map details)

 

No Bezier curves here!

 

Charles Paxton Zaner

A Journal cover created by a lesser hand (in my opinion) employing the ubiquitous
calligraphic bird flourish, a common practice device.
The penmen all too often literally "put a bird on it."

Much of what penman were hired for were business documents like these checks and vouchers.
This has hand written directions for the engraver and electrotyper.

Rules for drawing drop shadows

Commemorative cartouche for Ulysses S Grant, and "President" detail by Daniel T. Ames, 1868.
I believe Ames created the large ornament-choked plaque that still exists in the lobby of
the original Cooper Union building. Mid-nineteenth century lettering is usually fussier than later examples,
and typically employed more flourishes and scrollwork.

The Zaner-Bloser Collection at the University of Scranton is one of the largest collections of American ornamental penmanship of the later 19th and early 20th centuries.

The company was founded in 1888 by Charles Paxton Zaner as the Zanerian School of Penmanship. Elmer W. Bloser purchased a share of the company in 1891 and in 1895 the school changed its name to the Zaner-Bloser Company. They began publishing their own penmanship manuals. The school prepared students for careers as penmen. Penmen were essential to business, preparing legal vouchers, monetary notes, ledgers, writing correspondence and creating documents before the invention of the typewriter. They also created most advertising display lettering. Zaner-Bloser also taught students to become illustrators, engravers, and engrossers. Engrossing is the type of ornamental lettering used on diplomas, commemorative documents, and certificates. To my astonishment, Zaner-Bloser is still in business and--swimming against the proverbial tide--continues penmanship instruction today.

The Scranton collection is incredible and includes professional journals, hand writing manuals, instructional material for children, photographs of children learning to write, scrapbooks containing examples of ornamental penmanship done by master penmen and more. A good portion of this is digitized and downloadable in large sizes!

"Anyone know what typeface this is?"

 

Often (younger) designers will post a vintage image and say "Anyone know what typeface this is?" They don't realize that from the 1920s through the 1950s (into the 60s too, but less so) much of the decorative display text and headlines in advertising was hand lettered. Of course the late 19th century and early 20th had lots of hand lettering too-- but often these were such elaborate extravaganzas no one would mistake them for a typeface. Decorative lettering of that sort-- what you'd see on certificates or legal documents-- was called "engrossing." Hand letterers-- or "penmen"-- were a major commercial force in the 19th to mid-20th centuries and there were dozens of highly esteemed penmanship schools around the country. Next post, I'll focus on the Zaner-Bloser penmanship school -- it'll blow your mind. As an aside, there are several digital typefaces that have been created that are based on handlettering. See Zaner script for example.//

A friend gave me this wonderful 1927 style guide for commercial hand letterers last night. It was so fantastic that it inspired me to finally end my long absence from this space. So if there's anyone out there still reading this blog-- enjoy!

B. de B. at the TDC

B. de B. on view at the Type Directors Club through March

see all the prints at www.b-de-b.com

 

B. de B. is a project of The Graphics Office. It's a growing collection of historically-based designs that rescues ephemera from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and reimagines it for the twenty-first.

Our alphabet prints are inspired by nineteenth-century British children’s educationalchapbooks, pamphlets of rhymes, folklore, and news that were sold on the street for pennies.

We created this series with images and letters from a large, antique scrapbook made in England in the 1830s, which we bought a few years ago. "B. de B. Russell Juvenile Album" stamped onto the cover led us to trace its long ago owner Blois de Blois Russell, a young man of privilege with a strikingly unusual name. He attended Oxford, rowed crew, and died at 22.The prints are on view through March at the Type Directors Club: 347 West 36th Street, Suite 603.

Come visit at upcoming events like Book Night: Present & Tense (Thursday, March 13) and Designers in the Nursery: A Look at Picture Books by Graphic Artists (Tuesday, March 18)

There are three sizes of prints on heavy, bright white archival stock available for order at
www.b-de-b.com:  8 x 10 inches   •  18 x 24 inches   •  24 x 33 inches

Christmas Cocktails and Greetings of the Season

The Tiny Universe of Dot Screens

all images from John Hilgart's 4CP blog 

 

 

Last post I noted the upcoming American Printing History Association annual conference on color. I'm looking forward to seeing Dr. Sarah Lowengard who will present “Why Color? On the Uses, (Misuses) and Meanings of Color in Printing”. From what I know of her she's smart and brings a multidisciplinary philosophical/critical eye to a seemingly narrow subject. I wrote about her, and her fascinating thesis project on color in the 18th century, in an earlier post, Arsenic, Sheep's Dung and a Yellow called Pink.

Another talk that stood out in the APHA roster is Gabriella Miyares' “Worlds, Dot by Dot: 4-Color Process* in the Age of Pulp Comics.” The look of classic pulp comics— cheap paper, ragged printing, colors made up from overlaid fields of dot screens and a welter of misalignments and fortuitous mishaps— is something that resonates in the collective pop cultural consciousness. From Roy Lichtenstein to designers today who ironically try imitating that haphazard mechanical look with the intensive digital precision of Photoshop filters.

Gabriella is a graphic designer based in New York City, working in stationery design but her background experience includes experimenting with letterpress, screenprinting, and intaglio. Last year she attended a course at the Rare Book School at UVa that had a mini-section on early, cheap "pulp" color printing, which got her thinking about "how superheroes, and comics, have that very specific "look" -- those ragged dots and misprintings and very specific color palettes." Gabriella shared with me some of her research for the talk: 

"Hands-down the best visual resource I found was John Hilgart's 4CP blog (http://4cp.posthaven.com/). In looking at these magnified and cropped examples it became clear that the artists were rather limited by a very imprecise printing process, but at the same time the look has become something iconic and beautiful in its own right. That I think was the germ of the idea for this talk. I wanted to explore how these comics were actually made, how much control the artists actually had, and also how emerging technology made this process/look extinct (though it is still imitated with Photoshop!)"... Another incredible visual resource in The Digital Comic Museum (http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/). This website is all volunteer-run by comics enthusiasts who... scan the comics that qualify as copyright-free and post them for anyone/everyone to enjoy. Many of the represented comics are specific genre comics (romance, sci-fi, crime, and propaganda comics) ...  I'll be covering the idea of nostalgia in my talk and I think this site is proof of nostalgia for this aesthetic. In the forums you can see a lot of people lamenting that the art of comics today just doesn't match up to the beauty of what it once was -- which on one level is very funny because back then the process was so crazy : colorists basically submitted a watercolor "guide" to a color separation house that would then do all the color, and there was usually no time/money to proof so you just had to hope they got it right...

I'm late to the party in discovering Hilgart's 4CP | Four Color Process: adventures deep inside the comic book site where he scans and artfully crops tiny sections from his seemingly vast comic collection— then blows these up to monumental proportions. His meta- musings on the worlds of dot screens on cheap paper is erudite, lyrical, singularly obsessive, and a little bit whacko. John is a former english teacher and his formidable command of language and literary references spar nicely with the simple subject at hand. His lengthy "manifesto" on "the scopophilic impulse that drives 4CP blog" and on the dot screen itself is well-worth your time and attention. A taste:

[T]he dots provide the visual experience of granular detail that the art itself cannot. Every detail is more detailed, while realism is systematically undermined. Crucially, this perforated universe and molecular level of detail are unintended and have no intrinsic relationship to the illustrative content of comic books. Four-color process delivers surplus, independent information, a kind of visual monosodium glutamate that makes the comic book panel taste deeper.

High-tail it over there.
* "Four color process" is the mechanical reproduction — or simulation—of colors created from overlaying fields of dot screens of cyan, magenta, yellow and black-- the four "process" colors. Comics were printed cheaply and fast in a particularly coarse screen (fewer dots per inch) on pulp paper that absorbed the ink. The resulting registration misalignments, ham-fisted color representation, and ink "bleeding" are what we enthusiasts find so compelling.