Photo-Lettering's One Line Manual of Styles

One of my favorite things to do in Charleston is to browse the lovely shelves of Blue Bicycle Books! One of my recent finds is a copy of Photo-Lettering's One Line Manual of Styles!

Photo-Lettering was a company founded in 1936 and continued to operate until 1997. Its popularity exploded because designers could set text and titles much faster using photo lettering than any other options available. 

Type Token has a much more detailed history of the process, along with drool-worthy type spec pages from other publications; and Forgotten New York has a wonderful peak behind the curtain of what it was like to work for PLINC during the 1980s. 

Nowadays the keepers of all things photo-lettering are House Industries. After acquiring the library they set up a website for modern-day users to set type (almost) just like the old times! The story of them purchasing the library is quite entertaining:

“When interviewing Ed Benguiat for a magazine article, he lamented to us that the Photo-Lettering library was just sitting in a storage facility somewhere in Manhattan. The current owners failed to listen to Ed’s warnings to keep up with the times and his subsequent proposals to digitize the fonts. Ed even prompted House to place a bid on the collection. Thinking that the price tag was way out of our league, we never bothered to follow up on his suggestion, until Bob Rose (then one of PLINC’s owners) offered to sell us the library. Since we heavily referenced the PLINC catalogs during the creation of our many display fonts, we thought it was ironic yet somehow appropriate that we become the stewards of this historic collection. ”

— House Industries

The last two photos are samples from House Industries' coveted specimen books. I've been a raging collector of them ever since they spoke at Drexel University while I was at school. At this point I'm a little bit obsessed :) but my boyfriend assures me it's not hoarding - yet. 

Brands with Heart

If you give your address to strangers on the internet, they'll send you things! For a limited time Monotype and Lippincott were sending out their Southwest brand guidelines for free. I just got mine in the mail and it's quite a beauty. To read more on the partnership Underconsideration has done an excellent review. Enjoy!

Review: The Recorder

With any electronic device and an internet connection you can find the entire history of any subject matter in 0.29 seconds. That kind of access is a wonderful gift, but sometimes becomes an overload of information. A quick search for the ratio of tablespoons to teaspoons (it's 1:3) leads to at least ten minutes down the drain looking at beautiful pies on Pinterest.

So instead of jumping from article to article in an endless scroll I find myself more and more drawn to physical printed pieces. But not just because of the design or quality of printed publications. It's their specific editorial viewpoint in which I've become most interested.

As soon as I received The Recorder by Monotype I was of course impressed by the quality and design, but more than that it was the way the articles almost told a story. Turning the pages I became much more intrigued by the curated nature of the publication - everything from typeface to layout to photography - that created a dialogue between the written articles and their visual representation. 

Exhibit designed by Abbott Miller

The variety of articles were all excellently written and researched. The article on the exhibit Century: 100 Years of Type in Design was fascinating because of the obviously clever way of using hundreds of periods from hundreds of typeface as a unifying and textural element. 

Perhaps my favorite was The social effects of typography in public spaces, illustrated by David Doran, about how certain areas pay attention and regulate neighborhood signage, but others don't. Yet another article about "ghost signs" and the forgotten painted advertisements of bygone eras has me looking at billboards today and thinking "dear god, this is what future generations are going to remember as a visual landscape of our time".

All of it sparked interest about how design relates to history, and how it will serve as history, in ways I've never thought about before. 

Illustration by Darvid Doran

Studio tour and work by Jamie Murphy of The Salvage Press

“Type infiltrates almost every aspect of our visual culture. Whether it’s on our screens, in our books, or on the streets we walk; the letters that surround us play an integral role in our lives. ”

It was quite enjoyable to sit down and read from cover to cover, without a jaunt over to google to find more information about a particular term or look up some specific subject matter. Given the rise and success of rather recent boutique published magazines - Uppercase, Wrap, even Nobrow to name a few - I wonder if this is indicative of a larger trend of the way we consume media. Or perhaps editorial print has never been on the verge of death, has never even been a bit under the weather, and I'm the one late to the game :)

Mmmm... Gold foil on the front and back covers of the Recorder