Love this, Kris. Thanks so much. I've only tapped the surface, but the continuing series on ribbons and scrolls is my favorite bit so far.

Do they note the typefaces they are using throughout Typo? Not in the colophon. Wondering because the sans serif could be from the same source that inspired Ludwig. Or maybe it's as much Bureau Grot.

Looks a lot like Miller & Richard's Grotesque series.

Oh, and thanks, Kris, for posting this.

I came across this New Zealand site recently in a web search, as there happens to be an account of the ATF Self-Spacing Type in the publication, as well as a series of articles on type measurement before the point system.

Kris, what a wonderful resource to be digging through! Thank you for posting this.

So much to read and see here,
thanks for linking to this.

Weird and wonderful images, as well as stories. My lithographer friend was very amused by the suggestion of using strong tea to clean zinc plates instead of the usual beer or tobacco.

Wow.

So much to look through. Thanks for this! Wouldn't it be wonderful to get a facsimile in book format?

Good stuff. Very good.

--
evan m
www.evanmade.com

Indeed, they were appropriately cautious when they noted in the article at

http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Har08Typo-t1-g1-t1-body-d1.html

that by the year 2000 foundry type might no longer be in use. On the other hand, they were over-optimistic about the march of progress when they speculated that English spelling would be reformed by then as well.

And while printing houses may be without types, they are not without presses or ink - even though laser printers do make that sort of thing possible, it is not usually the most economical way to proceed.

Mind-boggling, isn't it? We sit here at our keyboards and smart phones, typing our thoughts, and seconds later it's been composed into pages and published worldwide for hundreds or thousands (well, maybe dozens) to read. Talk about movable type. Those guys had no idea.

Nice use of an ornament in this report about the doings of a Mr. Fish:

I think that's his avatar.

@Mark
Whoa, you're right - here's how it appears in the following issue!

@Stephen
Wondering because the sans serif could be from the same source that inspired Ludwig. Or maybe it’s as much Bureau Grot.
But nobody closes up the apertures of their sans like this!

What's up with that flipped opening question mark that Beau W posted? Was that commonly done?

He does that a couple times, as if he is using them in the style of quotation marks.

I remember reading (but don't remember where) about the various attempts at punctuation reform that were attempted by creative typographers over the years. The article (book?) specifically mentioned question marks, but gave the interobang as an example.

This definitely caught my eye, although mostly by engendering confusion:)

(I like it more than the damn smiley, especially on web-forums that automatically replace my p) with some winking face)

An opening question mark would be most welcome in English. Spanish is lucky to have it - and they actually can use it mid-sentence on individual words! Same with the exclamation mark. BTW, Armenian does that with floating marks (placed on individual vowels).

And Kris, again: Thank you! That guy was like a century ahead of his time.

hhp

What’s up with that flipped opening question mark that Beau W posted? Was that commonly done?

I don't think so. I don't remember seeing it before, and it doesn't appear in Legros and Grant's Typographical Printing Surfaces (1916) which is quite exhaustive in illustrating sorts.

On my web site, I give a description of an imaginary programming language in which X ! was gamma(X + 1) but ! X was X * i, i being the principal value of the square root of -1.

But I also included a quaternion data type in the language. So, if the character set available included the opening exclamation mark and question mark of Spanish, I used them as unary operators to multiply numbers by j and k.