Hot type is a retronym. When metal type was the only game in town it was just called type, but as more and different means of transferring ink to paper came into being a qualifier needed to be retroactively added. Hot type. Type that was once molten. Type that was once hot.
Foundry type, linotype, monotype are all forms of type that have been cast from molten metal. They are little pieces of sculpture carefully cast according to the strictly monitored vision of an artist.
Eric Gill (who’s art probably sits, in a derivative form, on your computer right now) was a sculptor. He worked in multiple mediums. He worked in stone, in a large scale, and cut beautiful life-like pieces from inanimate rock. He also used the same sorts of reductive processes when he engraved sensuous images of passionate lovers into boxwood and maple. And those images he printed alongside of his type.
His type, too, is sculpture. Cut to size from steel punches and then struck into brass matrixes, Gill’s letterforms were cast in the millions. Like the human figure, we know what a letter should look like and we can recognize a lovely figure when we see it. Gill’s type forms have stood the tests of time and, even more than Michelangelo’s David, are visited daily by multitudes.
Eric Gill once said that “letters are things not pictures of things” and, like his other sculptures, his letter forms are things. They are beautiful things. They are sexy things.
In their original form they are hot.
So perhaps hot type is not such a retronym after all.
Kent, A.K.A. Dad. The large printing presses crank loudly as my dad stands by them and takes control. He pulls the paper out and hands it to me. I feel the indent in the words that sink into the paper, the solid red color that soaks into the thick paper.
Printed in two colors with a blind stamp of the client’s logo in the background, this business card is printed on 160 pound stock. The deep impression of the blind run lends the 3 dimensional air of Art Deco architecture to what might be considered a 2 dimensional medium.
There seems to be a lot distressed wood type being used in the design of print ads these days. And when I say “seems to be” I mean that if you don’t look too closely you might mistake it for distressed wood type.
Matt board isn’t just for framing pictures anymore.
It used to be that one would go visiting and leave behind an indication of having called. This was the calling card.
Oh man, is the type on this card small or what.
Having spent a good part of my life treating the printed word as a precious thing has put me at a bit of a risk of thinking like a museum archivist. Although I take great pains to use stable materials in the printing and binding of the work produced here at The Nomadic Press, that does not mean that all printed materials need to be handled with an obsessive reverence.
Sitting here, in the middle of winter, I am comforted by images of warm Summer retreats. Here is a wood engraving of a North Woods escape.