digital wood typeface

Adobe sold (twenty years ago already!) sets of digitalized woodtype, Wood Type 1 and Wood Type 2. A little bit more research will show you that there are plenty of ‘wood types’ around.

IAN, The Museum of Printing in Andover MA has wood type for sale, they have a letterpress store that sells things to raise money for the museum. John Barrett (letterpress Things) runs the museum store as well as his own store. Dick G.

At Lead Graffiti we are trying to get into the wood type making business. Bradley 12 line is the first one we are doing. The problem we’ve found is that it just isn’t cheap. Getting the endgrain Rock Maple right is hard and expensive in itself. Get in touch with your interests. Maybe there are others that would also be interested. We are cutting some Bradley this week.

We’ve changed things from this photo, but generally it shows how it looks.

http://www.briarpress.org/museum/browse?t=4

Since we did that first prototype, we’ve added numbers, and even an umlaut to the vowels.

We’ve even added a second size ampersand that works better with lowercase letters. The regular one is quite large normally.

and even an umlaut to the vowels.

Everythïng is bëtter with än ümlaut!

You should take a look at what Wooden Type Fonts is offering. Many historic designs in digital type http://www.woodentypefonts.com/Pages/page1.html.

I plan on making their Mansard font in wood and offering it for sale, probably by the end of March. I will make an announcement on Briar Press when I am closer to having the font ready for production. I will also post pictures and a description of the process on virginwoodtype.com.

I think Ian is looking for digital fonts, not real life wooden ones.

I think one thing that really could be a great material for display type and sign type is plastic. Really high quality cast sheets of the right type of delrin would print about as well as any wood type and have a memory to it to boot, and they are very machinable, be it C&C or panto.

Delrin plate (aka acetal) is $80 a board foot (12” x 12” x 1”) for the hobbyist. While I’m sure we can find a cheaper source, that seems a high starting point.

Preston

helimited, Dupont made a plastic plate i think it was dycrill, it was a hard plastic with a metal backing. i still have one that i print from that is about 30 years old. Dick G.