ITALIAN WOOD TYPES - BOXED SET 2/3
€580.00
Portfolio of 36 loose prints.
This is the second boxed set of the “Archive of Styles - WOOD” series, ant it is dedicated to medium-sized (6 to 25 lines) Italian wood types.
The other two boxed sets are devoted to big (up to 118 lines) and small (up to 8 lines) Italian wood types, respectively.
This 36-character series is printed from wood types cut by hand in Italy between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century.
For a century and a half, billboards and theater posters printed using wooden type had shaped the urban landscape of Italian streets and squares, giving them an unmistakable character.
The size of the type blocks in this set ranges from 6 to 25 lines, equivalent to about 2,5 to 11 centimeters.
Limited edition of 88 numbered copies.
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This 36-character series contains punctuation, letters, and numbers.
They were printed on heavy-weight (300 gsm) Magnani pure cotton rag paper.
Their kaleidoscopic expressiveness—ranging from Apollonian restraint to Dionysian wildness, from old-style to fanciful typestyles—reflects the scope of Italian creativity in the field of wood type engraving.
Some of the hand-cut wood types which were used for printing this set:
Each piece of type, carved by hand using gouges and gravers, is unique. Some come from prestigious wood-type manufacturers (such as Salvati, in Foligno), others were cut by artisans or the typographers themselves, who did not signed them, and all lie outside the realm of serial wood type, mass-produced by pantograph.
Their typestyles range from garalde to sans serif, including didone, fat face, eclectic, Egyptian, art nouveau, and fanciful.
In honor of these characters’ multifaceted nature, each is printed with a different colour or shade, encompassing four distinctive tones of black.
The long service they have provided is evident when examining their surface. This “T”, for instance, carved in the second half of the 19th century, shows a few extra holes – who targeted both the letter's stem and the shoulder of the sort:
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The series is housed in a boxed set (16x27x3 cm) whose exteriors were covered with woodgrain paper made in Japan.
Both the title and the text on the boxed set were printed from handset Art Nouveau types, which were cast by Augusta Foundry, Turin, at the end of the 19th century:
The loose prints are housed in folders (12x15cm), with three prints per folder. The title “Archive of Styles” on the folders was also printed from handset Art Nouveau types.
These wood types are part of the historical heritage of the Tallone Press (www.archiveofstyles.com):
(© photo: Ottavio Atti)
This edition is a further contribution by the Tallone Press to the field of type design research.
The Press has long dedicated its studies to this discipline; in particular, timeless Apollonian classics were explored in the Manuali Tipografici, while modern, sometimes Dionysian 20th-century types by Italian designers Raffaello Bertieri, Giulio Da Milano, Alessandro Butti, and Aldo Novarese featured in individual publications.
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Neither monotype nor linotype are used. These typesetting systems from a keyboard are often passed off as manual typography.
The Tallone Press does not print from plastic relief plates either. Derived from digital compositions, they are very much in vogue to simulate the effect of type impression onto the paper.
Printed on very fine paper, this collector’s edition is a sophisticated gift meant to last over time.
Data sheet
- Size (cm)
- 16x27x3 cm (BOX)
Portfolio of 36 loose prints.
This is the second boxed set of the “Archive of Styles - WOOD” series, ant it is dedicated to medium-sized (6 to 25 lines) Italian wood types.
The other two boxed sets are devoted to big (up to 118 lines) and small (up to 8 lines) Italian wood types, respectively.
This 36-character series is printed from wood types cut by hand in Italy between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century.
For a century and a half, billboards and theater posters printed using wooden type had shaped the urban landscape of Italian streets and squares, giving them an unmistakable character.
The size of the type blocks in this set ranges from 6 to 25 lines, equivalent to about 2,5 to 11 centimeters.
Limited edition of 88 numbered copies.