Types Paper Print
s.l. [Vancouver]: Heavenly Monkey, 2012. Quarto, 30.8 x 20.6 cm. Cased in marbled paper over boards, with paper labels titled in bronze to the spine and upper cover. Abecedaried slate blue Guarro endpapers. Unpaginated [pp. 32]. Very minor rubbing to the covering paper at the corners, else a fine copy. “This book was set by Rollin Milroy. Robert R. Reid diagnosed the lunacy of a few aspects and helped prescribe the necessary correctives.” The text was set in the following typefaces and printed on dampened Guarro paper: the roman types: Bembo, Centaur, Cloister Old Style, Nicolas Cochin, Dante, Garamond, Gill Sans, Optima, and Perpetua; the italic types: Arrighi, Bembo, Blado, Cloister Old Style, Dante, Garamond, Granjon, Perpetua, Spectrum, and Weiss. A single page is devoted to each face. To facilitate comparison between the different affects produced by different sizes of type, each face was presented in three sizes. As Rollin Milroy notes in his foreword, this presentation helps to emphasize the way size affects the interaction between a letter form and the paper on which it is printed: “the heavier or more textured a sheet, the larger the face will need to be; otherwise the paper’s surface will visually compete with the letter form for your eye’s attention.” The text used to display the various faces is H.P. Lovecraft’s short story The Horror at Red Hook (1927): “In 2005 HM published an edition of his novella ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth,’ and while it befuddled or bemused most of the people who had been following HM’s progress to that point, over the years it has sparked complimentary and enthusiastic comments from a wide range of people drawn primarily by the author, not the mode of production. All of those people asked when HM would do another Lovecraft project. I confess to not being a devotee (too often he was clearly being paid by the word), but he was undeniably an American original. The story used here was picked simply because it is exactly the right number of words to fill the sample pages.” From an edition of 50 copies; the present copy is number 42 of 40 copies (Nos. 11-50) cased at HM and printed on Guarro paper only. For further comparison in affect, ten copies were printed with the specimens repeated on three different papers: HM Text, Arches Wove, and Guarro. These copies were bound by Claudia Cohen. (This Monkey’s Gone to Heaven, 1.28). Item #380
“I have to actually print a typeface on my hand press, before I can develop a sense of how to work with it during the stages that must precede printing. I do not really see a type until I have printed it. I notice how the strokes in some letters look too thick or thin, and how some letters seem inexplicably heavier or lighter. (I’ve found this to be much more common in roman faces, and as a result find myself increasingly drawn toward the consistency of weight and color in italic faces.) Sometimes this variation was the designer’s intention, but increasingly often these days it is the result of worn matrices. Whichever is the case, only after spending hours inking forms, doing the makeready, and pulling impressions will I know how a particular type looks in its different sizes, and whether it’s something I can add to my repertoire. […]
Several years ago, frustrated by the combined limitations of working with metal type in this day and age, I began experimenting with polymer. Like everyone who begins with metal, I was suspicious and dismissive of plastic. Then I printed some pages, and was very quickly converted. I printed them in my usual manner, on the handpress, with dampened paper. Gone were all the problems that had plagued my metal years: poor castings, worn serifs, page designs compromised by my lack of titling figures or accents or some other necessary sort.
When making the transition to polymer, I chose to work with digital type as if it was metal. Computer design programs can make setting text very easy, and if you’re not careful, they will. I have found that disabling many of the automated features is a good first step. I do not allow any letter-spacing to make lines fit. I restrict word-spacing to the same range I use with metal— between 1/5 and 1/3 em. In selecting the faces for this reference, I have also compared digital sizes to actual metal ones for each size I want, and made the necessary adjustments to have the digital conform to the metal.
This combination of 21st-century digital technology with a commitment to 19th-century printing techniques strikes some people as odd, even heretical. All I can say is, with polymer, I have been freed from constraints both aesthetic (i.e. having to use the face or size you have, rather than the one best suited) and logistical (having to constantly distribute and set type as you work through a project, rather than doing all the setting at once, and then being able to get into an uninterrupted rhythm when printing), and the pages I’m printing consistently exceed any I ever managed with the metal I had. That’s all I really care about.” — Rollin Milroy, from the Foreword.
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