Wooden letters
Wood characters are printing types ( letters ) of wood.
Wherein as letterpress known movable type high-pressure process , like him Gutenberg had developed, was usually worked with lead letters. For large format printing, especially for poster printing , letters made of lead were too expensive and the printing forms too heavy. That is why the letters and characters were made of wood, just as wooden letters . Was used maple - or particularly resistant bulbs - or beech wood , which could be further processed by the short fibers particularly well. The wood had to be stored for a very long time before it could be used for this purpose. The fonts produced in this way were called wood fonts or poster fonts .
Font sizes
Wooden fonts were made from 2 Cicero sizes upwards, there were (almost) no limits. Single letters as a substitute were also cut by typesetters ; this could also apply to very small font sizes.
Production history
Historically, the first types were probably made by wood cutters . In the training of typesetters , it was still common until 1960 to teach techniques such as lead cutting and also working in wood. In some cases, missing individual letters in the typesetting shops were replaced with such techniques. You can see this in old font collections, in which more or less successful individual types can be found again and again.
At the beginning of the 19th century, this manual work was no longer done by printers, but the high demand for poster fonts led to the founding of numerous companies, especially in England and the USA , which specialized in the production of these so-called wood fonts. In 1844 Isaac Merritt Singer settled in Fredericksburg. Here he worked in the workshop of the Day brothers, who made wooden letters. In 1846 he opened his own wooden lettering workshop in Pittsburgh . Here he developed his “machine for cutting wood and metal”, a further development of the pantograph for the printing industry. He patented it on April 10, 1849.
In Germany there were only a few pure wood type companies, but from the middle of the 19th century type foundries , which mainly produced lead letters , included wooden type in their production program. In contrast to the often very experimental fonts in the USA and England, their fonts tended to reproduce the strict and straightforward forms of lead fonts in a larger format.
There are currently only a few manufacturing companies. They mainly deliver for the artistic or school sector. Some of these facilities are also attached to museums.
Gedi writings
With the spread of offset printing (complete printing plates , no individual letters), the need for wooden type continued to decline, so that in the course of the 1960s, more and more type foundries stopped producing wooden type. The remaining demand was met by a single company until 1975, namely Gedi-Schriften of the Diller brothers in Bamberg . Gedi fonts had taken over many original wood fonts from other manufacturers, such as Gebr. Klingspor , D. Stempel AG , H. Berthold AG , Ludwig & Mayer and Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei , when they stopped production.
Museum of Labor
The Museum of Work in Hamburg in 2004 took over the complete inventory of the company Gedi fonts and entrusted the restoration of production capacity of the factory to the master engraver Daniel Jansen, of the project as a thesis studying graphic design at the University of Applied Sciences Hamburg conducted.
The core of the manufactory is a wood type milling machine from Gebr. Klingspor from around 1920 and 79 original templates of 210 characters each from historical fonts from the most important German type foundries. Using a pantograph , the letter template is transferred to a wooden block on a reduced scale. The basic shape is milled out, the corners are cut out by hand.
source
- Heidelberger Nachrichten, issue 256, 2006, page 60, "With old technology to new ideas"
