Paul Shaw Letter Design

Sign for Savoy Taylors Guild Ltd., The Strand, London (c.1906).

Sgraffito on a wall in the Giudecca section of Venice.

Detail of a neon sign for a barbershop in Grottaferrata, Italy.

Detail of page from Les Ecritures Financiere, et Italienne-Bastarde (1647) by Louis Barbedor, a French writing master.

Detail of store sign for Cortese Frizzoti in Venice. The letters in black have been painted over a gold ground which covers a former store name in mosaic tile.

Medieval inscription in Round Gothic capitals. In the cloister of S. Giovanni in Laterano in Rome.

Capital E and G stencils from collection of Eric Kindel, Reading, England.

Ghost signs with printer’s fist on wall of Rue de la Commune in Montreal.

Detail of painted directional sign for Coney Island covering mosaic sign indicating Up Town Trains. 53rd Street station of the R line in Brooklyn.

Punches for punctuation cut by Giambattista Bodoni at the Museo Bodoniano in Parma, Italy.

Detail of cover of Warren’s Standard Printing Papers specimen book by S.D. Warren (1929). Design, ornament and lettering by W.A. Dwiggins.

22 January 2023

Blue Pencil

Blue Pencil no. 66—James Mosley on the dating of several Imprimerie Royale type specimens

The authenticity of the date given for Épreuve d’un Nouveau Caractere pour l’Imprimerie Royale (Paris: Gravé par Alexandre, [1712]) in my list of type specimens from 1700 to 1769 (Blue Pencil no. 62) is considered spurious by type historian James Mosley. He wrote about it (and several other specimens of the romain du roi with questionable dates) in an article published by a French bibliophile society in 2002. Excerpts from a 2008 PDF version of Mosley’s article, which he …
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20 January 2023

Legacy of Letters

Legacy of Letters 2023—The Braidense Library in Milano

Detail from All’Immortale Iperide Foceo broadside by Giambattista Bodoni (1781).*
In the morning of the first day of Legacy of Letters 2023 we will be visiting the Biblioteca Braidense in Milano with lettering and type historian James Clough as our guide. I asked James why the Braidense was important for type enthusiasts. He sent me this overview:

The Braidense library for type afficionados
During the eighteenth century Milan and the Lombardy and Veneto regions were under Austrian rule and in 1770 …
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17 January 2023

Blue Pencil

Addendum to Blue Pencil no. 61—a missing type specimen

Blue Pencil no. 61 Type Specimens 1486 to 1704 is a list of type specimens that have been digitized and made available online. It is not an attempt to list all known surviving type specimens. However, there is one undigitized specimen from this time frame that deserves to be mentioned since it was once part of the Gustav Mori collection whose contents have been digitized by the Goethe Universität. Riccardo Olocco called my attention to it. Here is what …
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LEGACY OF LETTERS

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CODEX, the journal of letterforms

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