Image of the Day: Pine Swamp Road

Inking Ampersands

For my birthday, my son and daughter-in-law gave me some metal and wood letterpress ampersands to add to my collection.  A few weeks later the head pressman at work [Ron] was cleaning out the area where we store leftover ink used on past printings.  I asked if I could have one of the containers in order to ink up my collection, and Ron’s eyes lit up when he saw the ampersands.

A little ink goes a long way. You can see some of the test prints I made of each individual ampersand.

I arranged the ampersands in a ‘cloud’ for printing, inked them up, then used a brayer  to get smooth impression.

Holding the group as I inked up.

Pantone 659; a pretty sweet color.

Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir 2.0, ‘Sleep’

“The 2011 Virtual Choir video features 2052 performances of 'Sleep' from 1752 singers in 58 countries, individually recorded and uploaded to YouTube between September 2010 and January 2011.”


Watch and listen the entire video here.

Wood Type of the Month: De Vinne

via International Printing Museum

Read this month’s wood-type column to learn what typeface was named not for the designer but for the man who foresaw the need for this typeface style.

Mercator: An Italic Hand

via letterology

A 1540 monograph of Gerardus Mercator on the lettering of maps in 16th C Netherlands and his treatise on the italic hand. One of only 3 known copies in existence. Mercator (1512-1594), a Flemish mapmaker is best known for the Mercator projection world map named after him.

See more images here.