Paul Shaw Letter Design » Uncategorized

27 February 2023

John Rissieeuw on Legacy of Letters

John Rissieeuw (Legacy of Letters 2015):
I found Legacy of Letters to be a bracing, whirlwind tour of historic sites important to letter history. Both the novice and the well-initiated will find delights and revelations in the many presentations of letterform, type, and printing. The burning need, generated by days of museum and library viewing, for hands-on printing and ink-on-fingers is satisfied with a four-day workshop at the Tipoteca. A true joy to those with type on the brain.
John …
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20 February 2023

Lucia McCreery on Legacy of Letters

Lucia McCreery (Legacy of Letters 2010 and Legacy of Letters 2019):
These tours are not to be missed! The two I’ve been on were tremendously enriching and enjoyable. I would never have known about—let alone got to—most of those lettering and type shrines on my own, nor had such outstanding food and wine in primo Italian settings. The others on the tour were great people, and we could not have had a better leader than Paul Shaw.
Legacy of Letters …
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16 February 2023

World Trade Center bus shelter poster 1986

In the 1980s I taught calligraphy/lettering at the metro campus of the New York Institute of Technology, located a few blocks north of Columbus Circle. One of my colleagues was John Bloch whose primary job was as an art director at the advertising agency McCaffery & Ratner. The firm had the World Trade Center account and in 1986 John was in charge of creating a bus shelter poster to promote the Observation Deck.
In Letter and Image, a book …
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27 November 2022

Tipo Cibo Vino (Legacy of Letters 2022)—Part 7: Letterpress Workshop Day 2

Galley proof of the C list of pasta names set by James Stroud and Janine Wong.
Tied-up galleys of pasta lists of names awaiting proofing. The C list is at the left.
On day 2 of the letterpress workshop participants were finally free of the drudgery and precision involved in setting text type. They were able to indulge their creativity with larger metal type and wood type as well as fleurons, ornaments, rules, borders, dingbats, and whatever else they could find in …
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15 November 2022

Tipo Cibo Vino (Legacy of Letters 2022)—Part 4: Parma, Langhirano, San Lazzaro di Savena, and Bologna

This is the fourth installment of a day-by-day visual account of Tipo Cibo Vino 2022. (All photographs, unless otherwise indicated, are by me and are copyright Legacy of Letters.)
July 11, 2022 | Parma
Museo Bodoniano and Biblioteca Palatina
In the morning we walked the short distance from the Hotel Torino to the Biblioteca Palatina in the Pilotta. There Dott.ssa Caterina Silva, the curator at the Museo Bodoniano, had arranged a mix of manuscripts, books, and realia (library-speak for physical objects) for …
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12 June 2022

What you will learn at CalRBS History of Type in August 2022—no. 50

I will be teaching the history of type at California Rare Book School (CalRBS) August 8–12, 2022. The 5-day intensive class will be based at the Letterform Archive in San Francisco. Along with lectures, discussions, and hands-on examination of typographic artifacts and materials at the Archive there will be field trips to other Bay Area institutions to look at books, broadsides, and more. The class will be small (7 to 12 people).
Here are 10 things you will …
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24 May 2022

What you will learn at CalRBS History of Type in August 2022—no. 22

I will be teaching the history of type at California Rare Book School (CalRBS) August 8–12, 2022. The 5-day intensive class will be based at the Letterform Archive in San Francisco. Along with lectures, discussions, and hands-on examination of typographic artifacts and materials at the Archive there will be field trips to other Bay Area institutions to look at books, broadsides, and more. The class will be small (7 to 12 people).
Here are 10 things you will …
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20 May 2022

What you will learn at CalRBS History of Type in August 2022—no. 16

I will be teaching the history of type at California Rare Book School (CalRBS) August 8–12, 2022. The 5-day intensive class will be based at the Letterform Archive in San Francisco. Along with lectures, discussions, and hands-on examination of typographic artifacts and materials at the Archive there will be field trips to other Bay Area institutions to look at books, broadsides, and more. The class will be small (7 to 12 people).
Here are 10 things you will …
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14 May 2022

What you will learn at CalRBS History of Type in August 2022—no. 8

I will be teaching the history of type at California Rare Book School (CalRBS) August 8–12, 2022. The 5-day intensive class will be based at the Letterform Archive in San Francisco. Along with lectures, discussions, and hands-on examination of typographic artifacts and materials at the Archive there will be field trips to other Bay Area institutions to look at books, broadsides, and more. The class will be small (7 to 12 people).
Here are 10 things you will …
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13 May 2022

What you will learn at CalRBS History of Type in August 2022—no. 7

I will be teaching the history of type at California Rare Book School (CalRBS) August 8–12, 2022. The 5-day intensive class will be based at the Letterform Archive in San Francisco. Along with lectures, discussions, and hands-on examination of typographic artifacts and materials at the Archive there will be field trips to other Bay Area institutions to look at books, broadsides, and more. The class will be small (7 to 12 people).
Here are 10 things you will …
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8 May 2022

What you will learn at CalRBS History of Type in August 2022—no. 2

I will be teaching the history of type at California Rare Book School (CalRBS) August 8–12, 2022. The 5-day intensive class will be based at the Letterform Archive in San Francisco. Along with lectures, discussions, and hands-on examination of typographic artifacts and materials at the Archive there will be field trips to other Bay Area institutions to look at books, broadsides, and more. The class will be small (7 to 12 people).
Here are 10 things you will …
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19 February 2022

Blue Pencil no. 48—One Hundred Books Famous in Typography, Part 9 [Fifty Typefaces Famous in Typography]

Note: When I began this dissection it was intended as a single post—even as it grew much longer than expected. However, I was forced to break it up into smaller chunks when I ran into an unexplained “failure error” when trying to save the draft one day. Rather than try to break up the dissection into equally sized posts based on word counts, I decided instead to make separate posts based on the divisions used in the Grolier Club exhibition …
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17 October 2021

A Visit to the Meister Museum in Amsterdam

Karina Meister at the door to the Meister Museum. Photograph by Paul Shaw (2006).
The Meister Museum: A Very Private Wunderkammer
Introduction
I have known Karina Meister, a calligrapher/graphic designer/artist in Amsterdam, for nearly forty years. We first met in 1983 when she was living in the Kinkerbuurt neighborhood of the city, not far from the Vondelpark. In 1991 she moved to her present apartment in the Transvaalbuurt neighborhood. I don’t remember her first apartment very well, but her second one has fascinated …
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18 August 2019

The Definitive Dwiggins no. 93—Laurance B. Siegfried

Laurance B. Siegfried was a first cousin of W.A. Dwiggins on his mother’s side. He was born February 18, 1892 in Montclair, New Jersey to Addison H. and Mary (née Hetrick) Siegfried. Laurance was the youngest—by over a decade and a half—of three children, the other two being Mary (born 1869) and Frederick (born 1876). A little over two years later, on April 17, 1894, his mother died. [1] Seventeen months to the day after that his father died …
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31 August 2018

By the Numbers no. 2—Fat Faces in New England Cemeteries

This second installment of By the Numbers is devoted to examples of Fat Faces found on gravestones in cemeteries in Massachusetts and Maine. Fat Faces are neoclassical (didone) types in which the thick strokes have been made even heavier while the thin ones remain thin. They first appeared in England at the beginning of the 19th century. [1] Aimed at advertising and commercial printing, rather than book printing, they quickly spread to other countries, including the United States. Here are …
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2 December 2017

Paper Is Part of the Picture no. 15—Strathmore Artists’ Series (1923)

This is one in a series of blog posts accompanying Paper Is Part of the Picture: Strathmore Paper and the Evolution of American Graphic Design 1892–2017, an exhibition that I have curated at The Opalka Gallery of The Sage Colleges in Albany, New York. The exhibition runs from October 3 to December 15, 2017.
4 Men & Strathmore envelope (1923). Design by Oswald Cooper. Photograph by Annie Schlechter.
The third (and last) of the Strathmore Artists’ Series was mailed out in …
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