Wood type
In letterpress printing, wood type is movable type made out of wood. Used in China for printing body text, wood type became popular in Western printing during the nineteenth century for making large display typefaces for printing posters, because it was lighter and cheaper than large sizes of metal type.
Wood has been used since the earliest days of European printing for woodcut decorations and emblems, but it was not generally used for making typefaces due to the difficulty of reproducing the same shape many times for printing. In the 1820s, Darius Wells began industrial wood type production using the powered router, and William Leavenworth in 1834 added a second major innovation of using a pantograph to cut a letter's shape from a pattern. This made it possible to mass-produce the same design in wood repeatedly.
In the twentieth century lithography, phototypesetting and digital typesetting replaced it as a mass-market technology. It continues to be used by hobbyists and artistic printers.
Historical background
Both in China and Europe, printing from a woodblock preceded printing with movable type.
Along with clay movable type, wooden movable type was invented in China by Bi Sheng, although he found clay type more satisfactory, and it was first formally used to print by Wang Zhen. Wood type was hand-carved to make individual types for the very large character set of Chinese. Clay type and metal type were also used in printing in China; a problem with wood and clay types was that they could not be made to accurate dimensions, leading to metal type being adopted from the late fifteenth century. Manufacturing, selecting and redistributing sorts for a large character set was cumbersome, and much printing in China continued to be made from custom-cut woodblocks of entire pages of text, rather than from movable type.
In Europe, woodblock printing precedes European movable type printing, and the block book appeared in Europe around the same time as letterpress printing. However, a major disadvantage of woodcut lettering is that once made by wood engraving, it could not be easily duplicated by casting, whereas metal casting could be used to quickly create many metal copies of the same letter, and with the smaller character set of European languages it was practical to cast type for every letter needed. European printing from the beginning used cast metal type.
In European printed books, wood engraving was used for both decorations and for large lettering, like titles. It was possible to carefully duplicate woodblocks by casting in sand. According to John A. Lane "the duplication of woodblocks by sandcasting is documented in 1575, probably goes back further, and... duplicated decorated initials became common in the Netherlands around 1615."
James Mosley comments "there is probably a prehistory of wood types in big letters cut by hand, especially among provincial printers, but there is no evidence that wood letter was widely used until machine-cut types were introduced." Mosley and Justin Howes have documented some cases where woodblock lettering was used shortly before metal type became available in the same styles; heavy roman types on lottery advertising before the arrival of fat face types, and later a slab serif woodblock a few years before the first known printing type.
In the early nineteenth century, London became a centre of development in bold display typefaces, the arrival of the printed poster spurring demand for bold new types of letter like the fat face and later the slab serif. However, these types were initially made in metal. In 1810, William Caslon IV introduced "sanspareil" matrices, made like a stencil by cutting out the letter in sheet metal and riveting it to a backing plate, producing much sharper type than sandcasting; it was quickly copied. The large metal types produced were cast with hollows in them to reduce the weight.
Decorated types were cut in wood and multiplied by a variation of stereotyping known as "dabbing", in which a woodcut was struck into molten metal on the verge of solidifying to form a mould. Modern printing historians Giles Bergel and Paul Nash have experimented with the technique; Bergel reports that "perhaps the most counter-intuitive feature of the process is the fact that wooden blocks can survive direct contact with molten metal. Apart from some scorching around the edges and some cracking (perhaps made when prising them loose rather than from the heat) the blocks were undamaged and could be dabbed over and over again."
Introduction of wood type
Modern wood type, mass produced by machine cutting rather than hand-carved, was invented by Darius Wells (1800–1875), who published his first known catalogue in New York City in 1828. He introduced the lateral router to cut out wood type more quickly than handcarving.
William Leavenworth in 1834 introduced the pantograph, allowing the same form to be reproduced from a pattern, and manufactured wood type in Allentown, New Jersey. Most wood type produced since has been made using a pantograph, or later using die-cutting.
Some pages from Leavenworth's only surviving specimen, now in the New York Public Library, are shown below.
"Italian" (reverse contrast, see below)
Mature industry
In the mid-nineteenth century there were numerous wood type manufacturers in the United States. All the significant manufacturers were based in the Northeast and Midwest, many around New York City or in Connecticut. The market for wood type was apparently limited and most businesses had side-lines as dealers in other printers' equipment, or making other wooden goods. One of the larger firms until the 1880s was the company of William H. Page, near Norwich, Connecticut. Wood type competed with lithography in the market for display typography.
Sample page from 1859 specimen, Wm. H. Page and Co.
Common type styles included the slab serif, fat face, sans-serif, reverse-contrast or "French Clarendon", and other genres such as "Tuscan" (spikes on the letter), "Grecian" (bevelled) and ornamented forms. (The use of fictitious adjective names for newly-invented type styles was common with wood type manufacturers but not invented by them, for example in London Vincent Figgins had called his first slab-serif "Antique" around 1817 and the Caslon foundry's first reverse contrast typeface around 1821 was given the probably fictitious name "Italian".) Types were made in extreme proportions, such as ultra-bold and ultra-condensed. For Bethany Heck, "wood type in the US was pioneered by mad scientists who strained good taste and legibility in an attempt to cover the broadest range of ornament, width and weight".
During the 1890s, the Hamilton Manufacturing Company in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, owned by J. E. Hamilton, grew rapidly and took over most of its competitors. It continued to make wood type until 1985. The surviving materials from the company are now preserved at the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum, also in Two Rivers.
Wood type had distinctive characteristics compared to metal type. Because wood is much easier to cut than metal, and each type is individually cut from a pattern, it was quite easy to introduce new styles and new sizes of type. Type was sold in a wide range of widths, and Hamilton offered to supply at regular prices any width desired in between its standard widths. "Chromatic" types were also made for printing colour separation.
Wood type manufacture was particularly common in the United States, and its companies made type in other languages for export. By the 1870s, missionaries working in China had commissioned type for printing posters, and wood type was also made for Russian and Burmese for export. Besides this, American manufacturers made German blackletter, Greek and Hebrew types catering to the large immigrant communities. There were also manufacturers of wood type in France, Germany, Britain and other countries.
According to S. L. Righyni, in the late inter-war period in Britain, the standard letterform on newsbills posted by newsagents was "the sans-serif wooden letter-form", especially bold condensed sans-serifs from Stephenson Blake, although the Daily Express used Winchester Bold and The Times had a custom design similar to Kabel Bold Condensed. (Although wood type was used for news bills and posters, large newspaper headlines were rare in British newspaper printing until well into the twentieth century.)
Wood type manufacturers
United States
- Darius Wells
- W. Leavenworth
- William H. Page
- Hamilton
United Kingdom
Germany
- Will & Schumacher, later Sachs & Co.
France
Legacy technology
With the takeover of the printing industry by offset lithography and phototypesetting, reproductions of wood type with their resonance of Americana were offered by phototypesetting companies such as Photo-Lettering Inc. and Haber Typographers, and used in the 1960s by designers such as Bob Cato and John Berg, and later Paula Scher and Louise Fili. Artistic printers like Jack Stauffacher carried on using wood type, finding that it was a cheap way to achieve creative effects. (For wood type historian Rob Roy Kelly, the aesthetic quality of wood type manufacturers declined in the twentieth century; Nick Sherman and Frode Helland have commented on a staggeringly bad rendition of Futura in Hamilton's 1951 specimen that features inconsistent stroke weights, the dot on the i and j at different heights, and the 8 in the specimen printed upside down.)
In the 1950s, Rob Roy Kelly, an American graphic design teacher, became interested in the history of wood type and built up a large collection from sources like old print shops and printers' families. He published a history of the industry, American Wood Type, 1828–1900 in 1969. His collection, now at the University of Texas at Austin, has been studied by other historians of wood type such as David Shields.