Decorative Steel Foundry Type

This month's feature is a set of decorative steel foundry type from 1959. It is numbered in the Henrietta Kilpatrick Collection as #1996.002.3. Before printers used computers to design and print text, type foundries would produce typefaces for letterpress printers. In this example, each piece is called a 'sort' and they would have been used in a Monotype machine, as opposed to a Linotype. In Linotype machines, the letters would have been all cast together in a 'line-o'-type', whereas in a Monotype machine, each letter is cast by itself, and a typesetter would assemble the letters by hand. 

The pieces with this artifact are all decorative, used primarily for posters or advertisements, and would not have been used within a large body of text. In fact, many professional typographers avoided decorative pieces like this except for ornamentation on title pages, chapter headings, and initials, since it is very difficult to read large amounts of text in decorative styles. The bottom two rows of type are meant to be part of the same font set because the groove on the bottom face, called the 'nick', is the same across all of them. The nick on type pieces served no mechanical function except to help typesetters align types correctly. All of the pieces with this artifact are larger than typical body type; the larger pieces at the top are about 1" tall. 

We hope that you enjoyed this peek at our collection! We'll be back next month with another artifact. Have a great April!