
A California Type Foundry Is Keeping Vintage Printing Alive - diodorus
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/m-h-type-foundry-san-francisco
======
GuiA
The center for the book ([https://sfcb.org](https://sfcb.org)) in San
Francisco offers intro to letterpress classes, which I cannot recommend
enough.

Being able to go from layout to printed paper so directly and viscerally is
fantastic. If you've ever raged at InDesign or Microsoft Word, the physical
embodiment of type, spacers, etc. feels like getting a glass of cold water in
hell.

Of course it comes with its own tedium (can't Cmd + Z, can't just download new
fonts, etc.), and I wouldn't advocate that anyone but specialty shops do a
majority of their work on a letterpress; but having poured many frustrated
hours into InDesign and its buggy features, it felt like a liberation to be
able to control things physically.

To a degree, I feel like introduction to typography should be taught on a
letterpress. You develop a much stronger feel for what's going on, and you
physically grok what a baseline, em, en, etc. are. In my typography classes,
students got confused by these notions because the definitions got muddied by
the various software interpretation and implementations of it over the years
(and the professor didn't do a great job at clearing it up either).

Having used the original thing first, the software implementations (and the
liberties they took) became much easier to understand for me.

~~~
dreamcompiler
I used to hand-set type at my own letterpress company as a kid. What you say
is true; there's nothing like being able to see and feel 3D letterforms when
you're learning typography. Plus you have to learn to compose words upside
down and backwards, which means you become an excellent speller with no need
of spell checkers.

OTOH you might get lead poisoning. But I was probably in more danger from all
the solvents we used back then.

~~~
abakker
You can get Bismuth and Aluminum type for some fonts. I've never used bismuth,
but Aluminum was fine, it just lacked the heft.

Speaking of lead poisoning though, A pet peeve of mine is when people upcycle
old california job cases in their homes. They look cool, but really should not
be kept around in a home, especially one with kids.
([https://www.google.com/search?q=california+job+case](https://www.google.com/search?q=california+job+case))

~~~
dreamcompiler
They bug me because usually the type just gets thrown away and the case sold
to hold knickknacks. But I hadn't thought about the lead dust they contain.
Excellent point.

------
52-6F-62
See also in Toronto: [https://chbooks.com/About-Us](https://chbooks.com/About-
Us)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coach_House_Books](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coach_House_Books)

They have an open house once or twice a year where you have the chance to run
a print with their old flywheel platen press and see a demonstration of
Linotype typesetting. They'll also show you around their refurbished
Heidelbergs.

Here's a photo of Stan with the Challenge Gordon press (used to share a drink
[too many] with him at the old James Joyce pub on Bloor where he was a regular
when I was at U of T):

[https://quillandquire.com/events/2015/08/28/happy-50th-
coach...](https://quillandquire.com/events/2015/08/28/happy-50th-coach-house-
books/)

The Wayzgoose is real soon, actually! And beer/wine/hotdogs:

[https://www.facebook.com/events/863612030704140/](https://www.facebook.com/events/863612030704140/)

(Funny enough they even had early inroads in the digital publishing space
with:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftQuad_Software](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftQuad_Software))

