Typography Tuesday
In March 2023, we posted about our friend, Wisconsin graphic designer, letterpress printer, stonecutter, radio personality, and collage and book artist Mike Koppa and his little adventure in type cleaning. He was engaged in bathing an entire case of 10 pt Franklin Gothic Condensed type, which led him to cleaning more cases of Franklin Gothic in different sizes, which led to him printing a book using every piece of type he had cleaned. The result is this book, Understanding This Book, or, Zen and the Art of Metal Type Maintenance, or, Let's See Your AI Do This by Augustine Maxwell Jones, a pseudonym Koppa has used in the past. The book was printed in 2023 at Koppa's Heavy Duty Press in Liberty Township, Wisconsin, in an edition of 18 copies. It is essentially a list of the 20 steps it took to the ultimate printing of this book. He writes:
When all my drawers of Franklin Gothic type needed to be cleaned, the mundane but necessary shop maintenance task turned into a book about the process. The result is a 20-page book featuring every last sort from nine California job cases of genuine ATF Franklin Gothic typefaces—maybe not older than the hills, but definitely older than me—in varying stages of wear, arranged according to a variety of strategies only likely to occur when composing individual metal types by hand. The final product of this very spontaneous and time-crunched project is a bold book conveying the frantic experience of creating it, while celebrating Franklin Gothic in a typographically jazzy manner.
We can attest to the great pleasure of exploring this typographic adventure. In the colophon Koppa states that the book is:
HanD seT In all soRTs of TRue ATF FRanklIn GoThIcs, In vaRyIng STaGeS of weaR buT SoakeD & ScRubbeD aS clean AS ThEy'RE GonnA GET, baREly pRoofED, AnD pRInTED on EnouGH HAhnEmuhlE BIbLIO, BuGRA, & InGRES TO yIELD 18 cOPIES.
A fine tribute to Morris Fuller Benton's Franklin Gothic!
View other posts featuring the work of Michael Koppa.
View more Typography Tuesday posts.
