Bill felt that Virgin Wood Type was his legacy. So he dedicated most of his time since his diagnosis to training me to make wood type. Most of the type that has shipped over the past few months was made by me, Geri McCormick, Bill’s wife. I am determined to continue the manufacture of wood type.

I have found this wonderful young man who reminds me of Bill of yesteryear. So Derek and I are working together to continue to make wood type.

I survived the brain surgery in April. I had quite a large tumor removed from my brain in late April and stayed in the hospital for 9 days. Upon release I was able to walk and talk and do everything almost normally. Really a remarkable recovery. At least for the short term I had plenty of energy to work on making type to fill some of the back orders that I was terribly behind on. During May and June I was able to fill around a dozen orders that had been purchased by some of my new customers. I thank everyone for their patience and understanding during my slow resurrection.

I still have a few orders to make and I intend to work through those orders during the next month or so.

Last week my web site was severely hacked and after a little despair and a lot of floundering I have the site running in a basic way again. I am not sure if I will ever recover everything but the site limps along.

I restored the ordering process to most of the pages and am willing to take a couple of orders now. I think the shopping cart is working again, so if you are interested in ordering something, please give it a try.

Since I make all of the type to order, it will take a while to fill new orders. Depending on my ongoing cancer treatments, I must warn you that it will probably take a few weeks to make any new orders. If anyone orders a new font or more, I will send a personal email to   let you know when to expect anything.

I would like to thank everyone who is supporting me throughout this period.

Thanks so much.

Bill

Easter Sunday I had to go to the emergency room of the University of Rochester Medical Center because my health was deteriorating. They immediately put me in intensive care and 2 days later removed a massive tumor from the right front of my brain. I spent a total of 9 days in recovery and was then released. The surgery was very successful in that I can still think and talk normally and physically I am intact.

It is all very early in the process but I have been diagnosed with cancer in my brain and cancer in my lungs. What the future will bring, I do not know at this point. A series of treatments is being designed but it is still too early to tell what will happen next and subsequently.

I have been struggling lately to fill back orders and generally to keep up with everything. I fell behind in early fall when I accepted a huge order from an art school that was beginning a printing school and needed type to get going. That order took me a solid 6 to 8 weeks of work to make the type and ship all of it.

In the meantime orders continued to come in and I fell at least 6 weeks behind receiving an order and then making the type. At the same time I was starting to become less efficient at getting around and weaker when it came to the work involved in making type.

At the same time I started losing track of things such as orders and vast amounts of time. I didn’t realize it at the time but I think my mental condition was deteriorating. I have a bunch of orders to fill that have been paid for and people are waiting for. Until I am solid on making the back orders, I need to stop taking new orders for a couple of weeks.

I am in the midst of sorting everything out and I will try to contact everyone who I owe things to and will establish a realistic schedule to complete each order.

So, as much as I regret it, I must stop taking new orders all thoughts of new typefaces and other projects and try to get back on track. At this point, I am still able to work and I think I have enough raw wood to complete the orders that I have to make.

I anticipate losing time to medical treatments in the near future, but so far I am able to work. I may share additional health information as time moves on.

Bill

Week and Month blocks

I have a complete set of month names and 2 sets of week names that came with the American Wood Type Mfg. Co. collection. I am not sure if people want or need these blocks so I have not cut any samples yet. All of these are reversed on round cornered rectangles. I can make new patterns for these elements and offer them to match the calendars if anyone is interested. Contact me through email or leave a reply below if you want to explore these additional calendar elements.

Mansard Extra Bold is from the Wooden Type font collection and the patterns were produced directly from the digital font drawn by Jordan Davies. The digital version of Mansard is available from myfonts.com.

I am making the Caps and Figures in 6, 8, 10, and 12 lines. The lowercase is not available at this time.

Virgin Wood Type is pleased to announce the availability of Simple Shapes in specially priced fonts. Each font contains a single shape in four sizes.

You get:

• 2-10 Line
• 2-8 Line
• 4-6 Line
• 4-5 Line

All of the Simple Shapes are on square bodies.

Other sizes or multiple pieces of a single size are made to order. Please contact me through email with your requirements.

I totally enjoy the first inking of any of the wood type that I make. That is the time that I can really see the typeface that I have spent hours making. Since most of the type that I make is sent to customers as uninked “virgin” type, it is gratifying to see.

Sometimes it even prints well on the first pass. It really depends on the packing of the press and how good or bad the tympan sheet is. Often I have to makeready a couple of weak (short) characters. I usually use 1 piece of masking tape on the bottom of the weak characters to bring up the height.

I had several email exchanges with David Wolske about pricing wood type. One time was just after I first started trying to sell wood type on this site, and how a single font in 4 sizes has 60 prices online. I figured out how to load pricing into the store, but it is not much fun.

The conversation drifted to replacement characters. I said I was nowhere near ready to publish pricing. Too many unknowns.

Somehow that conversation lead to the Waiting for the Big One project. Good project—it had a beginning, middle, and end. But, I needed to try again. Something more normal. Real world. (smaller)

“Well, what about the Aldine Expanded that we talked about?” Said David.

“Yes.” Said Bill.

“I think I will redraw the entire alphabet.” Said David.

I thought, “That sounds smaller.” It’s not.

Here is the reality of the way it works with making any letter using a pantograph. You need to have a good, tough, oversize original. This is one way to do it. Laser cut birch plywood really works.

I will soon have enough information to come up with prices, but I need one actual project that is a handful of letters for a font that is 6 to 10 lines tall. You will need to furnish digital outlines of up to 5 characters and you will get some type for free. First come first served. I am accepting 1 free project (you will have to agree to a blog post).

I obtained the digital font from Rich Kegler from the P22 Type Foundry, loaded it on my Macintosh and using InDesign software laid out the alphabet on two 15″ x 30″ pages at around 400 points—the idea was to produce masters that measured 4″ from the top of the tallest letter to the bottom of the lowest descender. I then selected all of the type and gave it a fill of “none” and a 1/4 point outline using black. The pdf export file was sent to Creative Plastics to be cut into 1/8″ baltic birch plywood.

On the back of the freshly cut patterns (you could still smell the burning of the laser) I found the baselines of the letters and the top and bottom of the pattern blocks and lined up a 4″ pine board across each row of letters. Each letter is then fastened to the pine board using a brad nailer.

The attached patterns removed from the birch plywood.The masters cut into individual blocks.“A” pattern mounted in the pantograph for tracing.A blurry photo of the cutting side of the pantograph.A complete 10 Line 3A font!