uwmspeccoll:Typography TuesdayLast week we presentedtypographer and fine-press printer Leonard F. Ba
uwmspeccoll:Typography TuesdayLast week we presentedtypographer and fine-press printer Leonard F. Bahr‘s type display bookTypoGraphia 1, hand-printed by Bahr at his Adagio Press in Harper Woods, Michigan, from 1975 to 1976. In it we showed an example of Bahr’s use of Bradley Combination Ornaments designed by WIll Bradley in 1952 and released by American Type Founders (ATF) in 1953. This week we present Bahr’s Experiments with the Bradley Combination Ornament that he hand printed at his Adagio Press, with the text in Hermann Zapf’s Palatino types, all printed on Fabriano papers in an edition of 473 copies in 1967. Bahr displays the many decorative combinations that can be derived from Bradley’s only eleven 24-point type characters, a few of which we show here.Bahr describes the origin of the ornaments when Will Bradley approached his friend Steve Watts, who was then type merchandising director for ATF, with a suggestion for a new series of type ornaments. Watts recalls that when he went to visit Bradley about the idea, the designer began to draw the designs freehand right in front of him:Mind you, Mr. Bradley was then over eighty-five years old… . I am pretty sure he didn’t wear eyeglasses, and I was astounded to see him work so rapidly, with results that were almost perfectly symmetrical, with an even distribution of color. The … designs we selected for production were not reworked at the Foundry. Engraving patterns were made by direct photography, and the corner designs, when combined in various arrangements in finished type, fit almost perfectly. Amazing!!View our other Typography Tuesday posts. -- source link