#matrix 16

Typography Tuesday

REGULUS TYPE

In 1996, American poet and type designer Dan Carr, co-founder with his partner Julia Ferrari at Golgonooza Letter Foundry & Press, designed and hand-cut his Regulus typeface. The font is named for the star rising in the constellation Leo when the first alphabet was completed. Of this endeavor, Carr writes:

Making this type required that I learn to cut punches well, to strike and justify matrices accurately and make or acquire all the necessary tools. In this process I gained fresh insights into the history of making type. . . . Cutting a typeface is like building your house with stones, you must hold each stone in your hands. Finding the shape and weight of each part of every letter and placing it where it fits involve choices that reveal the taste a punchcutter has for letters.

With the entire font of type complete after nearly ten years, Carr and Ferrari began setting their first first book in Regulus, Carr’s own Gifts of the Leaves, an exploration of the seasons through the symbolic alphabet of trees. Shown here are the prospectus for the book along with photographs of the punches and matrices for the type from Carr’s article “Making a Visible Spirit: Cutting Regulus Punches by Hand,” published in Matrix 16, Winter 1996, pp.19-25.  

Matrix 16 was printed in an edition of 925 copies by John and Rosalind Randle at the Whittington Press in England, and is a donation from our friend Jerry Buff.

View other posts with work by Golgonooza Letter Foundry & Press.

View more posts from Matrix.

View other posts relating to the Whittington Press.

Wood Engraving Wednesday

DIANA BLOOMFIELD

Diana Bloomfield (1915-2010) was an English wood engraver especially noted for her bookplates and commercial work. She also taught wood engraving at several south England institutions. In her work on bookplates she was greatly influenced by the master bookplate engraver Reynolds Stone. In her commercial work she composed designs for Oxford University Press (OUP) and Penguin Books, among others. Among her prints for OUP were wood engravings for the press’s quarterly journal The Periodical. 

The engravings shown here are seasonal images from Bloomfield’s work for The Periodical. They were reprinted from the original blocks and separately bound into Matrix 16, Winter 1996, between pp, 16 and 17, as part of Bloomfield’s own small memoir “Engraving for The Periodical.” In search of subject matter, Bloomfield would often make excursions into the countryside where “I would stand, pen and pad in hand, knees slightly bent in my intense concentration and would make a quick drawing, returning home to translate it onto my woodblock.” Of one of the winter scenes, she writes: