Brass Rules

I have brass rule.
Please tell amount you wish as it impacts price.

A company still in business in Sheffield called Stephenson AND Blake Ltd make this sort of thing, or did. They are of course a follow on survivor department of. …..

Much of the brass rule manufactured by Stephenson & Blake is produced for the plastic welding trade, but it is made to 0.918 and suitable for printing too.

2016 is the bicentenary anniversary of the invention of brass rule. In 1828 Englishman Ebenezer Parkes claimed to have invented it twelve years earlier. His showroom at 142 Fetter Lane had a brass rule forme in the window for decades. Made from 4,500 pieces of rule, it cleverly illustrated the grand entrance to a Palladian villa. The first copies were printed on white satin and examples were sent to the Royal Society of Arts, which proclaimed it to be “one of the finest art works of our time”. St Bride Library holds one of the surviving paper copies of the piece.

Here is a bit of brass rule art by a comp at the Boston Type Foundry - shown in the American Printers Specimen Book Exchange ca. 1887 - the height of the brass rule bending fad.
-Steve

brass rule.jpg

…and a couple of the rule bending machines that once were common in printing shops.

Golding_rule_bender.jpg

Hansen rule bender.jpg

Another book worth a look is The Handy Book of Artistic Printing by Doug Close and Angela Voulangas.

platenprinter yes super, got it…amazing stuff on sheaff-ephemera.com
lovely loads of stuff.