In addition to working from the American Wood Type patterns, and there are many more to come, I have wanted to bring some truly new type into the mix. Rich Kegler of P22 Type Foundry and Western New York Book Arts Center has offered up one of his fonts. Enter a font that has never before been made in wood—Preissig Scrape.
These are photos of Preissig Scrape cut into Baltic Birch plywood using a laser cutter. Rich sent me the Macintosh fonts and I created an InDesign document and gave the letters no fill and an outline of 1/4 point. The characters are all around 400 point type–whatever fit into 4″ from the top of the tallest letter to the bottom of the lowest descender. I exported the document as 2 pages into a pdf file and sent it to Creative Plastics to cut.
This post and probably others will explore how to make this digital font into wood type.
The next step was to cut up some pine for the blocks and line up the letters on the 4″ wood and shoot all of the letters into the wood using a brad gun.
If you zoom the picture above you can see the sawing lines that I drew using a square. I then took the patterns to the table saw and carefully cut them into blocks.
I did the same for the lower case, the figures and the punctuation. I intend to trim the Caps closer to the patterns on the left and right so that I can cut them in the wood type tradition—tight to the edges of the body. I am inclined to leave the lowercase a bit looser so that when someone sets the lowercase it will have enough letterspacing so that it will not generally need manual letterspacing.
The next post will show the final trim for the patterns and cutting a few letters into wood. With any luck, I will find the time to proof in the print shop.
My goal is to offer this for sale to coincide with a promotion that P22 is putting on in March. I will be taking pre-orders for delivery in March.
I love it!