#spectrum type

Typography Tuesday

Cinque stili di piombo per una misura di bellezza (Five Lead Types for a Measure of Beauty), letterpress printed in Verona, Italy by Alessandro Zanella (1955-2012) in a limited edition at his Edizioni Ampersand in 1988, presents five classic typefaces presented in typographic arrangements and representative quotes. The typefaces from top to bottom are:

Monotype Greek 90

Baskerville

Dante

Bembo

Bodoni

Spectrum

Born in Vicenza and raised in the Valdonega neighborhood of Verona, Alessandro Zanella became a student of American expatriate printer Richard Gabriel Rummonds (b. 1931) in 1976 and founded his own press, Edizioni Ampersand, in 1982, producing almost 200 titles until his unexpected death in 2012. Our copy of Cinque stili di piombo is another donation from our late friend Jerry Buff (1931-2025).

View other type specimen books.

It's Fine Press Friday!

Kim Merker, the noted long-time director of the University of Iowa's Windhover Press (established in 1967), began his own private press, Stone Wall Press, in 1957, one year after arriving in Iowa as a poet to study at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop. This week we present one of his Stone Wall Press imprints, a series of poems entitled Excellency by Hungarian-American author, poet, and editor John Pauker (1920-1991), illustrated with original linocuts by Thomas Kovacs, and handprinted by Merker with Spectrum types on Rives paper in an edition of 230 copies in the same year he established the Windhover Press.

One of Kim Merker's students, the noted letterpress printer and book artist Bonnie O'Connell, wrote that Merker was a . . .

. . . devout adherent of the book as vehicle for text. His voicing of this through type selection and typographic dexterity is evident throughout his design career, where the proportion of text to margins conforms to the canon of the medieval scriptoria. Classical clarity amplifies literary intent. Classic clarity is always evident, but the urge to make these books reflect personal typographic and design style is also manifested. . . . This setting enhances the very understated typographic acrobatics Kim practices.

Our copy is a gift from our friend Jerry Buff.

View other posts with works printed by Kim Merker.

It’s Fine Press Friday

Gabriel Rummonds is an extraordinarily fine letterpress printer who wrote the definitive manual Printing on the Iron Handpress (1997). Rummonds was a set-designer in New York, an industrial designer in Japan for Fraser China, a book designer at Alfred Knopf, and a commercial attaché at the U. S. Embassy in Quito, Ecuador, before establishing his Plain Wrapper Press in 1966. He was also the founding director in 1982 of the well-noted MFA program in Book Arts at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. 

The title shown here, Circhi e Cene (Circuses and Suppers), with two poems in Italian by Andrea Zanzotto, English translation by Beverly Allen, and two, color etchings by Joe Tilson, was printed in a limited edition of 150 copies in 1979 on an 1847 Washington handpress by Gabriel Rummonds and Alessandro Zanella (who became a partner in the Plain Wrapper Press the year before) in Verona, Italy. The type was handset in Jan van Krimpen’s Spectrum and printed on handmade Cartiere Miliani-Fabriano paper made especially for the press. Calligrapher Golda Fishbein produced the the title lettering and the etchings were pulled by Giorgio Upiglio in Milan. The edition is signed by the poet and the artist, and our copy is a gift from our friend Jerry Buff.

View another post with work by Gabriel Rummonds.