Without Type: The Dynamism of Handmade Letters

WITH OUT T Y PE  TH E DY N A M I S M O F H A N DM A D E LE T TE R S SFCB

An exhibit from the collection of Letterform Archive

An exhibit from the collection of Letterform Archive

WITHOUT TYPE

WITHOUT TYPE THE DYNAMISM OF HANDMADE LETTERS An exhibit from the collection of Letterform Archive Rob Saunders, Curator Kate Robinson, Associate Curator

SAN FRANCISCO CENTER FOR THE BOOK January 22 to April 3, 2016

WITHOUT TYPE WITHOUT TYPE

THE DYNAMISM OF HANDMADE LETTERS In exhibition at the San Francisco Center for the Book January 22 to April 3, 2016 Rob Saunders, Curator and Kate Robinson, Associate Curator EXHIBITION COORDINATION FOR SFCB

Mary Austin CATALOG DESIGN

Pam Hava PROOFREADING/COPYEDITING

Kate Robinson, Rob Saunders, Amelia Grounds, Simran Thadani COVER DESIGN

Jessica Hische PRINTING

Autumn Press, Berkeley ISBN: 978-0-692-61657-4 ©2016 by the artists and the San Francisco Center for the Book 375 Rhode Island Street San Francisco, CA 94103 SFCB.ORG

This catalog was designed using Tangent typefaces by Terminal Design. The SFCB logo was created by Studio Hinrichs.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF THE SAN FRANCISCO CENTER FOR THE BOOK

Mary Austin, President Kathleen Burch, Vice President Tim Belonax Coleen Curry Alan Dye Wally Jansen Mary Laird Sean Lee Meryl Macklin SB Master Margaret Miller Brooks Roddan Anne Smith Erik Spiekermann Dorothy Yule Curtiss Taylor, Emeritus Duff Axsom, Emeritus SFCB STAFF

A portion of the purchase price of this exhibition catalog helps fund the operation of the San Francisco Center for the Book, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.

THIS EXHIBITION MADE POSSIBLE BY THE

Jeff Thomas, Executive Director Cheryl Itamura Chad Johnson Nina Eve Zeininger Weyam Ghadbian Alex Lin

GENEROUS SUPPORT OF

Grants for the Arts | San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund Kahle Austin Foundation The Kahle Austin Fund through the San Francisco Foundation

EXHIBITION COMMITTEE

Mary Austin (Chair), Kathleen Burch, Lucy Childs, Coleen Curry, Jennie Hinchcliff, Alyson Kuhn and Dorothy Yule.

ABOUT SFCB

The San Francisco Center for the Book, founded in 1996, is a center of inspiration for the book arts world, featuring the art and craft of letterpress printing, bookbinding and artists’ bookmaking. We are dedicated to the art of the book!

SFCB was co-founded by Mary Austin and Kathleen Burch, who recognized a growing need in San Francisco and the Bay Area for a facility specifically designed and equipped for the book arts. The first of its kind on the West Coast, SFCB now offers over 300 workshops and many free events every year, including the annual street fair Roadworks: A Steamroller Printing Festival.

In addition to workshops and events, SFCB creates numerous collaborative opportunities with local nonprofits, museums, and libraries.

SFCB also hosts special visits and hands-on demonstrations for students of all ages, teachers, librarians, corporate team building, collectors, visiting printers, artists, writers and designers.

CURATORS’ INTRODUCTION

ROB SAUNDERS, CURATOR

In recent years letterforms have broken through to a broader audience beyond artists and professionals working in the fields of graphic design, type design, and other letter arts. Amateur letterers and typographers abound, and almost everyone has a favorite typeface, or “font”. With this popular interest, the line between type and other kinds of letterforms has become blurred, and many refer to all of it as “type”.

Rob Saunders, Founder & Curator of Letterform Archive, is a designer, teacher, publisher, and management consultant who has had a lifelong interest in the letter arts, type, publishing, and graphic design. After curating a collection of graphic design, typography, and related ephemera over the course of 40 years, Saunders founded a nonprofit institution to share the collection, making it available for students, practitioners, and others interested in letter art.

This show is titled Without Type, meaning without the use of a font of repeatable letters. The letterforms presented here are all, at their inception, handmade: sketched with a pencil, cut out of wood or linoleum, written with an edged pen or calligraphic brush, torn or cut out of paper, or even built with vectors on a computer. Sure, some of these handmade letters may have ultimately been printed, whether from a block on a letterpress, from an etching plate or lithography stone, by offset or even digital printing, but you will not find a single example of lettering produced using a standardized font of type. Whatever the tools, these handmade letters are alive with the motion of their making, endlessly varied in concept and form. Every letter is unique.

Saunders began his career teaching at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Tufts University, while serving freelance clients and agencies, before founding a book publishing enterprise that included Alphabet Press (graphic design), Picture Book Studio (children’s books), and Rabbit Ears Books (book/audio packages), which was eventually acquired by Simon & Schuster. Prior to becoming Curator of Letterform Archive he served as a creative and marketing consultant with clients in the hospitality, technology, and financial industries.

Without Type gathers together the breadth of this expression by focusing on aesthetic echoes that bridge gaps of time, place, culture, discipline, and technique. Some echoes are conscious, as when a designer is inspired by beautiful letters from the past; others may be completely unintentional, though remarkable in their similarity. You’ll also find a broad range of mediums, tools and techniques, as well as varying states of completion, from pencil roughs, to hand painted sketches, and printed examples. All of these pieces, being handmade, are wholly original and unique, the singular works of artists across a wide range of cultures and throughout history. The groups of pieces draw comparisons across these ranging styles to pair, say, a spread from a 15th century illuminated manuscript next to a spread of abstract calligraphy from the 1970s printed in a comic book. Without Type also means beyond category: when letters are freed of typographic constraints, they do so many things type cannot imagine.

Threads of commonality intertwine with difference to paint a dynamic picture of the ways in which humans have crafted visual and textual communication throughout time, picking up on themes and ways of seeing, reading, and making that harken back to and transform old ways of working and communicating, starting with the hand, and echoing on and on and on.

KATE ROBINSON, ASSOCIATE CURATOR Kate Robinson, Collections Associate at Letterform Archive, is a poet and intermedia book artist with a deep interest in and active art practice around the materiality of language. She holds an MFA in poetry and book art from Mills College, and creates artists’ books and printed ephemera with a focus on innovative forms as Manifest Press. She cofounded and curated the Manifest Reading and Workshop Series, a founding series of the East Bay Poetry Summit, from 2011-2014 and currently performs collaboratively as The Third Thing. Kate was the 2014 Mills College Book Art Teaching Fellow, and has taught interdisciplinary workshops at schools and other institutions all along the west coast. She currently project manages Material Print Machine, an artist-run print studio and bindery and recipient of an Alternative Exposure grant in 2014.

ABOUT LETTERFORM ARCHIVE Letterform Archive is a library and museum dedicated to the promotion and study of the letter arts (typography, calligraphy, and graphic design).

The Archive is a center for inspiration, education, and collaboration, serving practitioners, students, and admirers of the letter arts.

Visitors to the Archive get hands-on access to an extensive collection of 30,000 books, posters, periodicals, prints, objects, and ephemera spanning a wide range of disciplines, countries, and periods. The Archive also shares its holdings through workshops, lectures, receptions and meals, publications, used and rare book sales, and state-of-the-art photography.

Special thanks to Amelia Grounds, Jessica Hische, Indhira Rojas, Kelley Stapleton, and Simran Thadani for their help with this exhibition and catalog.

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Opened to the public in February 2015, and located in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill district, Letterform Archive is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

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Fortunato Depero, cover of Secolo XX, 15¼ x 11½” Milan, 1928, lettering reproduced by lithography

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Fernand Léger, La Fin du Monde, 121/2 x 191/2” Text by Blaise Cendrars Paris, 1919, lettering printed by stencil

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P. Fleury, Nouvel Album de Lettres Peintes, 123/8 x 18” Paris, 1903, lettering reproduced by chromolithography

Jim Parkinson, SEX, 8 x 17” Oakland, 1971, original lettering for reproduction, ink on board

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Yakov Ruklevsky, poster for a 3D movie, 33 x 231/2” USSR, 1947, gouache sketch

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F.A. van den Honert, Dank erkentnis aan de Weleerwaarde Heer, 97/8 x 71/8�

Netherlands, 1805, shaped calligraphy on paper

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Robert Michel, Mez, 211/4 x 171/2�

Weimar, 1920, woodcut on paper

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Karlgeorg Hoefer, Buchstaben-Buch, 93/8 x 113/8�

Poetry by Fritz Usinger Ofenbach, 1977, original brush calligraphy and letterpress

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Toko Shinoda, Stream Joy, 131/2 x 101/4�

Tokyo, circa 1985, stone lithograph of abstract calligraphy

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Le Corbusier, sketch for poster design, 23 x 161/2�

France, 1950s, brush and stencil lettering on tissue

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William Addison Dwiggins, parcel wrapper, 125/8 x 183/8�

Hingham, MA, 1951, stencil lettering on paper

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Josef Luitpold, Die neue Stadt, 161/4 x 241/2” Berlin, 1927, woodcut on paper

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Sister Corita Kent, The Sea Queen, 193/4 x 23” Los Angeles, 1967, script and manipulated type reproduced by silkscreen

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Friedrich Neugebauer, Psalm 19, 151/2 x 101/2” Austria, 1959, pen & ink on paper

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El Lissitzky, cover design for Vešč, 121/2 x 101/4” Berlin, 1922, gouache sketch

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Walter Huxley, logo design, 111/8 x 85/8” New York, circa 1935, gouache sketch

Unknown artist for Affiches Gaillard, poster design, 153/4 x 113/4” Paris, 1930s, gouache sketch

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Jac Jongert, Van Nelle’s coffee label designs, 9 x 21/2” each Rotterdam, 1930s, lettering reproduced by lithography

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Albert Klijn, “ons schone stiel”, 113/4 x 81/8” Amsterdam, 1922, gouache on board

Arnold Bank, untitled alphabet, 17 x 271/2” Pittsburgh, PA, 1974, crayon and pen on board

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Lucas Sharp, Untitled, 60 x 437/8” New York, 2014, acrylic on plywood

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Unknown artist, Book of Hours, 75/8 x 10” Italy, 1510, calligraphic manuscript on vellum

Charles Gilbert, Prieres Chrétiennes pour Monsieur de Bonneil, 61/4 x 7” Paris, 1689, calligraphic manuscript on vellum

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John Pine, Quinti Horatii Flacci Opera, vol. 1, 71/4 x 8” London, 1733, engraved calligraphy printed by intaglio

William Addison Dwiggins, The Fabulist, no. 3, 91/4 x 141/8” Boston, 1921, calligraphy reproduced by letterpress

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Unknown artist, leaf from a liturgical manuscript, 77/8 x 63/8�

Greece, 15th century, calligraphy on paper

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William Addison Dwiggins, title page of The House Beautiful, 153/8 x 133/8�

Boston, circa 1925, pen and pencil sketch on tissue

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Johann Christoph Albrecht, Schön-Schreib Kunst, 97/8 x 151/4” Nuremberg, 1776, engraved calligraphy printed by intaglio

Anthon Beeke, Body Type, 113/4 x 113/4” Amsterdam, 1969 & 2011, photographed human bodies reproduced by offset lithography

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François Robert, Stop the Violence: Character Studies, 14 x 203/4” Los Angeles, 2010, photographed human bones reproduced by offset lithography

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Jan van den Velde, Spieghel der Schrijfkonste, 9 x 125/8�

Amsterdam, 1605, engraved calligraphy printed by intaglio

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Arnold Bank, Vive La Plume, after Jan van den Velde, 14 x 20�

New York, 1954, ballpoint pen on paper

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Paul Neu, Die Geheimen Visionen Einer Jungfrau, 191/4 x 27” Munich, 1924, lettering reproduced by stone lithography

Rick Griffin, Man from Utopia, 12 x 171/2” San Francisco, 1972, abstract calligraphy reproduced by offset lithography

Unknown artist, Illuminated Book of Hours, 71/8 x 95/8” Flanders, 15th century, calligraphic manuscript on vellum

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Unknown artist, Arabic manuscript leaf, 111/4 x 61/8�

Calligraphic manuscript on paper

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Hans-Joachim Burgert, Ludus scribendi, 93/4 x 12�

Berlin, 1976, calligraphy reproduced by letterpress

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Wes Wilson, Fillmore Auditorium handbills, 73/4 x 41/2” & 8 x 41/2” San Francisco, 1967, lettering reproduced by offset lithography

Alfred Roller, Ver Sacrum Kalendar, 10 x 191/8” Vienna, 1903, woodcut on paper

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Rudolf Koch, Der Knabe und das Immlein, 75/8 x 121/2” Poem by Eduard Mörike Ofenbach, 1912, calligraphic manuscript on paper

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E.R. Weiss, Sappho, 101/2 x 161/2” Berlin, 1921, engraved calligraphy printed by intaglio

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Jo Sang Won, manuscript novel, 11 x 145/8” Korea, 1850, brush calligraphy on paper

Timothy Ely, untitled artists’ book, 95/8 x 105/8” Washington, 2005, abstract calligraphy on paper

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Tom Ingmire, sketch for artists’ book, Diva Fall Jive, 13 x 21” San Francisco, 2014, calligraphy on paper

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Unknown artist, manuscript family history, 65/8 x 8�

Korea, circa 1880, brush calligraphy on paper

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Katharina Pieper, Legende von der Entstehung des Buches Tao Te King auf dem Weg des Lao Tse in die Emigration geschrieb, 93/4 x 123/4�

Text by Bertolt Brecht Hamburg, 1989, calligraphy on paper

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Ben Shahn, November Twenty Six Nineteen Hundred Sixty Three, 7 x 173/4” Poem by Wendell Berry New York, 1964, lettering reproduced by offset lithography

Mikhail Larionov, ticket for the Bal Banal, 85/8 x 107/8” Paris, 1923, woodcut on paper

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Willem Sandberg, cover of Open de Musea, 103/4 x 73/4�

Amsterdam, 1973, torn paper lettering reproduced by letterpress

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Eric Carle, sign for Picture Book Studio, 14 x 177/8�

Northampton, MA, 1985, prepared tissue collage on canvas board

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Albert Klijn, “Mille Fleur”, 31/4 x 43/4” Amsterdam, circa 1935, gouache sketch

Sister Corita Kent, “Damn everything but the Circus”, 113/4 x 113/4” Text by e.e. cummings Boston, 1970, script reproduced by silkscreen

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Mortimer Leach, “They’re Lamb Kabobs!”, 41/4 x 117/8” Los Angeles, circa 1955, ink and gouache on board

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Kurt Schwitters, Merz Kathedrale, 83/4 x 111/4” Hannover, 1920, lettering reproduced by stone lithography

Jack Hirschman, untitled poem drawing, 14 x 11” San Francisco, circa 1975, pastel & marker on board

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Gerhard Rühm, Schriftzeichnungen 1956-1977, 61/4 x 18” Hannover, 1982, scribbled text reproduced by offset lithography

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Jessica Hische, Without Type poster design, 12½ x 181/16�

San Francisco, 2015, pencil sketches

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