SET IN TYPE

Set in wooden type, in fact: the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin keeps the obscure skill of wooden poster type and printing therefrom alive. (So can you, if you join: they offer studio access as a benefit of membership.)

Wooden poster type? It was the standard; most old posters (and even some new ones), especially the ones run off in huge numbers to promote events, were made with wooden type, offering huge flexibility in font and form.* It was cheaper than cast type, too. How good is it? Have a look at a nice topical example, and you tell me. (Plenty more in their store).

More about wood type can be found at the Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. It appears the very last commercial manufacturer held on until 2001.
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* Windows users will find a parallel in Word: if regular typesetting is like normal typing in that program, wooden type is the Word Art utility.

A NEW SOURCE

Have a gander at Hand-Eye Supply. With a primary client base in the art/handicraft printing community, they carry a number of interesting and useful items, including a nice selection of sturdy work clothing and very fine-looking safety glasses.

Not a huge stock but a number of items I've not seen elsewhere.

SHOP TRICK

It's like the old carpenter said, as he hammered the screws into place: "Every trade has its tricks but mine."

Here's one. It's not much of a trick, but it helps keep me out of trouble with a router. You usually need to know the distance between the edges of the routed groove and the edge of the baseplate of the router, so you can clamp a guide down at the proper spot. You can calculate it but it's easy to get tripped up -- and why do it on paper when you can create an example and measure it directly? There you go! It's a lot easier to get everything in the right place with an actual example you can plop down on the work and use to mark it. A real pro might even use it to set dividers and eschew the numbers altogether. Me, I'm an amateur and this makes it easier to visualize how things will turn out.

As you might suppose, I'm building more bookshelves. As ever, I find a ratio of at least 4:1 between the measuring/setting-up and doing the cutting.

(The greenish tint to the freshly-exposed wood? It's a scrap piece of poplar, which often looks a bit green. Very nice to work with, harder than most soft woods. Smoothed and linseed-oiled, it will usually retain the hue.)

DREAM CAR

Proud of your new minivan, are you? The one with a flexible interior: repositionable seats, maybe a table? The nice flat-floor unibody automobile, all streamlined and with excellent visibility?

Yes, a heck of a vehicle -- as good an idea now as it was in 1935, when the Stout Scarab first rolled out. What, you've never heard of it? Most people haven't, despite contemporary articles describing it as the coming thing. They were very expensive and only a few were built.

But, allowing for stylistic differences and engine placement, you'll see plenty of its distant descendants on the road today.

(Stumbled over the Scarab looking up the Dymaxion car. Did you know a new one was finished just last year? And they're still tricky to drive).

HAROLD STARK, MASTER STEAM ENGINEER

At the Indiana State Fair this year, Tam and I saw an amazing -- and, I suppose, twee -- miniature steam traction engine, about half-scale, plenty big enough to ride aboard. It was steaming gently, clearly functional.

It turns out to be the work of Harold Stark, Master Steam Engineer, who's been a major part of the working antique farm machinery exhibit at the fair for the past 31 years. He's quite a guy. You'll find the short video and a little biography at Artisan Ancestors.

IT'S THE PAUSE THAT REFRESHES

Having stumbled into DecoPix, I found a few peeks at the old Coca-Cola plant in Indianapolis (or what purports to be -- the caption says "Indianapolis" but some of the links say "Cincinnati." Heads, race cars; tails, unique chili. Call it!).

We did have a nifty Deco soft-drink building and at least part of it is still around. The city had its very own architectural terra-cotta company, so it's no surprise a lot of the Art Deco and Moderne facades left here are of that type. (The old Stokely-Van Camp building is a particular gem).

...But there are some interiors to reckon with, as well. I've got to go see this barber shop in Circle Tower. (Which is itself a stunning Deco wedding cake on Monument Circle).

RADIO BOOK WISHLIST

Just the one item -- it seems the late Howard S. Pyle, W7OE, wrote Troubleshooting Amateur Radio Equipment, published by the not late company founded by and named for Howard W. Sams. It's out of print and my first tries at the Usual Sources have turned up nothing. It looks to me as if it would be a very handy book for any ham who likes older radio gear -- but anything Mr. Pyle wrote is worth reading.

Every so often, something he built shows up at the Dayton Hamvention. Yes, you could tell, even without his callsign on the front or back panel. (It usually is) His construction style is distinctive, with well thought-out layouts, neat wiring and sharp, concise photometal labels on everything. His writing is a bit that way too, carefully engineered and logical, though friendly in tone.

His is a name and callsign to watch for at hamfests and used-book stores.