Bill Wahl installs Drago’s fresh new platen at his shop on Main Street.
Bill’s Olympia Model 8, a popular machine at the last Type-In.
Old Man Monsen, the crazy-eyed.
The first 1/3rd of the book is all period printing trade advertising and pages of useful information for typographers and printers.
That’s right TWO Thousand Type Specimens of commercially popular fonts and ligatures/engravings from the Roaring 20’s.
I suspect that Dover books ripped off the Monson Type Manual pretty heavily for clip art.
Random Gibberrish that sometimes pours out onto a machine as it sits quietly awaiting the fingers…
The Monsen Type Manual of 1961 was a 2-volume 1,500 page monster. Some more info on the Monsen Type Manual.
I’m hoping so much for the 1980 one! To finally be able to date our SCM Galaxies and our late Olivettis would be priceless.
And meanwhile, that Type Manual is pretty priceless too. What an amazing thing you’ve found!
Merry Typewriter Day back at you! Drago looks fabulous. I must try a new platen just to experience what it feels like.
I’m a sucker for old type and technology books. Congratulations on the nice find.
It’s like some kind of Typosphere command centre at your place, Ted! Congrats on scoring the OMEF books. Hopefully, they’ll fill the gaps in the database.
And that vintage type manual is just too cool.
And Happy T-Day to you too!
Drago’s looking really good. T-Day cheers!
Ted, I don’t think it is just my imagination or my mood–your writing is getting better and better. If that random gibberish passage is inspired by the typewriter, you’re still the cause, or at least the conduit, for it. As a test text, it’s pretty worthy. Your blogs are always a must-read.
Do you think your interest in the typography books would there without your printing background–if you only had the typewriter connection? That Monsen Manual is a real gem!
== Michael Höhne
Well 3 years of practice at the typewriter should have resulted in something worth reading, it’s the “monkeys at typewriters” thing. :D
My printing background inevitably colors my interest in all side interests, from Typing – although when I came to the trade, typewriters were already gone from the scene professionally and type was generally set for us by a service bureau who used the “optical output to film” versions of the Varityper to render us film negatives to strip out onto mechanicals. In cases where there was a rush or the client didn’t want to spring for professional typesetting, we usually made do with Letraset rub-on lettering sheets or the KROY machine output pasted onto mechanical layouts and then photographed using a giant AGFA film imager to make the negative. It also colors my interest in photography due to my early experiences in that industrial darkroom photographing mechanicals, developing the negatives and then using those to burn the line art to aluminum plates for use on the press. I spent many a morning trying to catch the slanting sun on an old AB Dick lightbox to burn the exposure for platemaking and sniffing weird chemicals that were banned as “extremely hazardous” sometime in the early 90’s.
I think I’d still be into font manuals though. Armies of beautiful type all marched out in rows? who wouldn’t love to look at that? :D
Oh no, type tables. I spent miserable hours castin off typescript to estimate the length of copy in a certain font at certain size. But then the joyous payback when it came (as photoset galleys) back for paste-up and blow me down if it didn’t fit… most of the time. There were lessons learned but I would rather walk on hot coals than go back to mechanical paste up, at least for catalogue and brochure work.
Drago … Monsen … OMEF … beauty shot … and a parting, deliciously dark sentence. Today is a good day on To Type, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth.
It’s confirmed, BTW. We won both OMEF book auctions, and they should be in my hot little hands in no more than 10 days. Very excited! :D
Check out the Letterology post for today. Typewriter-y textual goodness. Maybe Jennifer would be willing to do some high-quality scans for the benefit of the Typosphere! http://letterology.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-1952-typewriter-type-issue.html
ooh, that’s a neat one. It would be handy to have that issue as a high-res scan. Anybody know her well enough to ask? (:
That’s a fascinating book – i’d love to see it up close. I hope we can get together again when I come down again at end of July.
Sure, just let me know a date and we can do a meet. We need to get Adney and maybe Bill Wahl in on it too! (: