Typographical Holiday Ornamentations Booklet

This month’s Artifact of the Month is a mid-20th-century booklet advertising different typographical ornamentations for the holiday season (#2021.05.027). Ludlow Typograph Company of Chicago, Illinois printed this catalog full of wintry decorations intended to be used as illustrations or borders on ads and posters as shown in the photographs. Six pages are dedicated to jolly images like Christmas trees, holly, Santa Claus, and reindeer. The assortment, printed in bright red or green, could be ordered in a variety of sizes. The back cover demonstrates nine different sizes available of Ludlow’s version of Old English font.  

The Ludlow Typograph Co. produced linecasting machines to make letterpress headlines, posters, and other large font media in conjunction with the more common Linotype machine. The Linotype was a printing machine that cast characters in a line rather than in single characters. The Ludlow was very similar to the Linotype but was much simpler. This meant the mats were set by hand instead of keyboard, and the machine had fewer parts and made it less prone to mechanical jams. Since the Ludlow was hand-set, this made large ornamental units that were hand-made easier to manufacture than on other linecasting machines, and that, in fact, became one of the company’s specialties. They published booklets like the one shown for printers and publishers to order ornamental type for the holiday season since they were too unique to be in usual use otherwise.