Type for Beginner

Type you can get your hands on is best. If you got plenty of money that can be new type from the Dale Guild or one of the monotype shops such as Skyline, Quaker City, etc.

A limited budget means having to use whatever used type you can locate. If you’re fortunate you live near Indianapolis, IN, Chicopee, MA or Toronto, ON. (Churchmans Boutique de Junque, Letterpress Things, or Don Blacks, respectively) or maybe one of the printing museums, which have sales of excess type .

Otherwise get to know your local printers groups and join in. Printers tend to know where the type is hiding.

As to which typefaces, use your own judgment. Pick a roman and an italic you like and print with them if you can find and afford them. If not, print with what you find.

Regarding the last post, please don’t include Skyline Type Foundry with the “monotype shops.” This implies that they use softer monotype type metal which wears faster, and this is not true.

Skyline uses Thompson type casting machines which produce foundry quality type. In addition, the type metal which Skyline uses, is old worn out foundry type which has been melted down and recycled. This metal has the hardness and durability which is desirable in handset type. I have purchased many fonts from them and have been more than satisfied.

Skyline Type Foundry in particular, has gone to great lengths to cast some of the beautiful and ornate types of long ago, and many of these have never been digitized. This gives us letterpress printers an edge over the other sellers of invitations, etc., because we can provide these fonts, whereas the people who set type strictly off the computer, cannot provide them.

There are very few firms left who cast new handset type. We need to support these firms as much as possible because if traditional methods of letterpress printing are to survive over the long term, we will always need type. For those of you who haven’t tried hand-setting type, I would definitely recommend it. For some jobs, you can set the type faster than you can make a photopolymer plate. And as I mentioned earlier, some highly desirable type, borders and ornaments are only available in metal type.

You can find Skyline Type Foundry (and others), in the Yellow Pages of this website, or on line at www.skylinetype.com

And yet, the Thompson caster was made and sold by Monotype and many of the mats cast on it at Skyline are Monotype mats. Most of the “Monotype” foundries are also using Thompson casters, at least where the mats are flat mats.

This doesn’t answer the OP’s question but I do agree that the matrix is the heritage. There are more considerations than metallurgy in distinguishing foundry type from Monotype. The matrix is the heritage. And, a Thompson is not a foundry caster, but was rather designed as a universal caster and fitted to accommodate all kinds of matrices. Unique in that regard, but let’s not make it out to be more than it is.

Gerald
http://BielerPress.blogspot.com

I certainly don’t wish to denigrate Skyline. I’ve bought fonts of type from them and been very happy. Same for Quaker City. I’m a hobby printer and not particularly knowledgeable about type founding beyond the basics. Every so often I ponder becoming an owner of of some type of casting system, but every time so far I’ve come to my senses and decided against it. I’ve watched others struggle with it and I’d rather be printing. I’m awfully glad there are folks like Bill Reiss and Sky Shipley for me to buy type from.

The Thompson caster was originally developed to a salable product in 1907 by John Thompson, and originally sold by The Thompson Type Machine Company. You can read its history at: www.apa-letterpress.com/T%20&%20P%20ARTICLES/Typecasting/Thompson%20cass...

Monotype didn’t acquire the Thompson caster until 1929, long after it had been perfected and many Thompson casters had been sold. For this reason among others which I mentioned above, I think a distinction can be made between the Thompson and the Monotype casters. They are different, and each type of caster has its place.

Geoffey, your statement compared Skyline with Monotype shops, rather than their respective machines. The only difference is that Skyline only has Thompsons, while most Monotype shops use both Thompson and composition casters, and occasionally a Supercaster, again depending on what type of mat is being cast, and text sizes are generally cellular mats for the comp caster. Despite the origin, most of the Thompsons I have seen were Lanston or English manufacture.

Beyond this point in the discussion, (and maybe before this point), I am not knowledgeable enough on casting to comment further.

I just thought that if Skyline uses recycled foundry type for metal, it must be pretty hard. That said, I must make a similar comment to Arie Koelewyn’s above, that I have used Quaker City type and been happy with that as well.

Truth be told, I have only worn out the type on one job, where I did 10,000 letterheads on Strathmore bond, and it was linotype (yes, softer metal). I had it set twice, and changed it halfway through so it would look as good as possible. That was the longest run I ever made with letterpress. I started out as a hobby letterpress printer, with a few money-making jobs thrown in. However, most of my printing career was in flexo, with a smattering of litho and gravure.

I used to work with a gentleman named Elmer Pettit who had worked on Monotype machines (35 of those years was casting composition for Better Homes and Gardens) for almost 60 years. The metal he used was as hard as possible considering the limitations of the melting pot and the strength of the plunger delivering the metal. But he would have been the first to admit that it could never be as strong as foundry. Monotypes were designed for speed , and the metal was designed to be used once and then remelted (mono=one). A Thompson cast a little more solidly, and a good operator can get the metal a little hotter, but the place where they both fail when compared to foundry is the pressure used to push the metal into the mold. I’ve cut Monotype and Thompson cast pieces in half, and the voids in the interior of the type are what makes them inferior to foundry. You can hold a similar sized character cast Mono or Thompson and one in foundry and there is a perceptible weight difference. I’m glad there are the resources of all three; so many faces and decorators are not available in foundry (and vise-versa). None of them are designed to take the abuse of the crash impression that is so popular right now. If you treat them with respect you should get good use from any of them. But the heirloom type is hard foundry, hands down.

Paul

It is called Monotype because it composes single characters (as opposed to its earler competitor the Linotype, which casts whole lines) not because it is meant for one-time use.
It is the mat that is the determining thing in casting. When one tries to increase temperature and pressure on a composition caster for harder type, the mats are often damaged or even destroyed. Replacement cellular mats are available from English Monotype for the time being, but no flat mats, nor any Lanston mats. Among hot metal enthusiasts, a few are electroplating or engraving flat mats and fewer are making cellular mats. The last existing typecasters are stewards who have a greater responsibility to use their equipment as it was designed, rather than to accomodate current fad for type for heavy impression.
Note that a few of Skyline’s faces are cast from Linotype mats.

I’ll probably butcher this a little because I don’t have my reference sources nearby, but the quote I recall went something like this:

“What typeface to use? What typeface to use? The Gods refuse to answer.

They refuse to answer because they don’t know!”

I think that might be attributed to William Addison Dwiggins.

Foolproof546

Yeah, sort of, but close enough. Considered the first typographic joke. Attribution is correct.

The most recent:

Q: How many letterpress invitational card printers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Thank you.

Gerald
http://BielerPress.blogspot.com

When in doubt…