The beloved Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum is finally up and running at its new location in Two Rivers, Wis. And some of the first pieces to be printed there are four new limited-edition specimen sheets, all on Appleton Coated paper. Numbers 5-8 in the series, the specimens feature three Hamilton fonts and one from the William Page collection.
5. Printed on Curious Matter Desiree Red, 100 lb. Cover, using Hamilton’s #235 font. “This handsome, high-contrast italic font was used widely in advertising during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Curious Matter, an avant-garde paper made with potato starch, provides a toothy finish allowing the strokes of this font to create a debossed effect that both compresses the fiber and provides contrast in the paper finish when printed via letterpress.”
No. 6 Printed on Curious Metallic White Gold, 111 lb. Cover using Hamilton’s #169 font. “This font, with its elegant swash terminals, evokes the design sensibilities of the Art Nouveau, which dominated the late 19th century….Metallic papers are especially well suited for the application of oil-based ink. After drying, the contrast between paper and ink is especially noticeable.”
No. 7 Printed on Utopia Two:Xtra Green (U2:XG) Ivory Matte, 60 lb. Cover using Hamilton’s Fat Face Roman font. “This face prints handsomely on this ivory matte sheet giving both a muted finish to the ink, while holding on to the subtle hues of letterpress ink.”
No. 8 Printed on U2:XG Matte, 100 lb. Cover using William Page’s #114 font. “The slender serifs and ornamental terminals of this Civil War-era font reproduce beautifully on coated paper. Utopia is especially well suited for showing the fine grain of wood type and printer’s reglet (spacing material), which was used to print the background of this specimen.”
