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William Hamilton Page
William Hamilton Page was born in Tilton, New Hampshire on March 14, 1829, to James and Jane Greenleaf Page. Page spent his childhood on a farm in the Connecticut River Valley and over the course of his adult life would become arguably the most influential American wood type manufacturer of the nineteenth century. In 1843 at the age of 14, Page started work as a printer’s apprentice in Bradford, Vermont. […] Read more – ‘William Hamilton Page’.
Wood Type Research
Wood Type Research is a blog of current research in wood type design, manufacture and use during the 19th and 20th centuries by David Shields, Associate Professor of the Department of Graphic Design at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Latest Articles
- Unit Gothic & Uniform Set Gothic: wood type as precursor
- “Innovations, being prepared over a long period of time, remained dormant for the most part, undiscovered and misunderstood, only to suddenly awaken, providing a characteristic expression for an entire century.”{1} — Fredrich Friedl The development of the typographic sans serif follows a path of revival and renewal from a crude set of capital letters through a series of stylistic and organizing innovations leading to the formal refinement and complex family […] Read more – ‘Unit Gothic & Uniform Set Gothic: wood type as precursor’.
- Chromatic Gothic Paneled
- The shaded, chamfered sans serif design named Chromatic Gothic Paneled was first shown as a two-color chromatic{1} in Wm H Page & Co’s 1874 Specimen of Chromatic Wood Type, Borders, &c. The schematic design, from which Chromatic Gothic Paneled was derived, was patented March 3, 1874 (filed Jan 5, 1874) as US Design Patent No 7,230 by William H Page. The patent displayed the underlying organizational structure of the […] Read more – ‘Chromatic Gothic Paneled’.
- The Nicholas J. Werner Typographic Collection
- The personal collection of specimen catalogs, periodicals, and ephemera belonging to the multi-talented Nicholas Joseph Werner (1858–1940) are held by the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department at St. Louis Public Library in the Nicholas J. Werner Typographic Collection. Werner began his work as a printer in 1873 in Atchison, Kansas at the age of fifteen. He became a compositor at the Central Type Foundry in St. Louis in 1882 and […] Read more – ‘The Nicholas J. Werner Typographic Collection’.