Be careful what you wish for

If you didn't read the blog entry about purchasing large Garamond type, you need to as that tells the reason behind the story.

Below are a few photos of the metal and its journey from Washington, D.C. to Lead Graffiti.

This is Mike Kaylor's truck with the cases of Garamond from 14 point through 48 point. The galleys contain the Garamond 60 and 72 point along with the 72, 84, and 96 Caslon. It turned out to be a beautiful day for a drive to Washington, D.C.

This is Roland Hoover (it was his type that he had collected over the past twenty years) and Greg Robison who volunteerd to weigh, caught in the act of putting their thumbs on the scale to see if they could squeeze a bit more money out of us. Just kidding. It was already plenty of money given that Roland had first said, "Do you want 600 pounds of Garamond?" Turned out to be way more.

Given that we were paying by the pound, this is Greg actually laughing as he totals the weight for the galleys. They topped out at 850 pounds. That is the 60 & 72 point Garamond and the 72, 84, and 96 Caslon. That doesn't include all of the type in the 16 type cases. If you ever wondered if type has weight, it does when it isn't digital.

Roland looking a bit sinister while showing us some of his wonderful wood type collection. Roland was the university letterpress printer for Yale University for a decade and was in the right place at the right time as many places started just selling the type and equipment for scrap. He has always been a great supporter, fan, an friend of letterpress.

A close up of one of the typefaces that will have a nice clean new home now that old dirty foundry type is out of there.

This was the letterpress birthday card we did a couple of weeks ago to celebrate Roland's birthday. It fits nicely across the mantle. Nice to see it was well received. We are hoping he likes our thank you for the type as much.

Some visually interesting type designed by Frederic Goudy. Honestly, you don't often see nudity designed into the type. Might have to find a reason to borrow this sometime.

Roland has an outstanding collection of cuts, borders, flourishes, and just about everything else you could want to print. While Tray and Ray moved type, Jill printed a couple of tailpieces to have made into copperplates which should be fun to print in the future.

A nice view of the 96 point Caslon. Double wow.

This is the whole stack of galleys totalling the 850 pounds. They averaged close to 28 pounds each.

This is the 16 cases of Garamond weighing in at 1105 pounds bringing the entire total to 1,955 pounds of metal type. The heaviest case was 96 pounds and most all of them were packed to just about the maximum.

Roland wanted the galleys back so this shows a bit of the process of transferring the Caslon to larger galleys. In each size a single galley would house the roman uppercase, roman lowercase, italic uppercase and italic lowercase.

Here is our Thank You to Roland which was the galleys of all of the 72-point printed one on top of the other. One of the things we love about letterpress is using it in a spontaneous way. No photopolymers, no sketches, not much premediation. Wood and metal type and the jump to ink on paper. This we thought ended up being a good example.

Now to have some fun printing some big sheets of typograpy. Anyone got a project?