Ian Schaefer

Returning from Heritage Printers, Charlotte, North Carolina

With the expert help of Bill Welliver and my numerous other helpers the new ‘Monotype’ Composition Caster acquired from Pat Taylor of Heritage Printers in Charlotte, NC, made it safely back to my shop in Lititz, PA, where it has been lavished with preparations for its new assignment.

• Read more about this ‘Monotype’ machine.
• You might also be interested in the Partial Inventory of the Typefoundry

Monotype Composition Caster is poised for unloading. Bill Welliver’s Thompson waits in the back of the truck.

Adam Martin’s hefty rollback makes it’s final approach.

Precision alignment.

And,…PULL!

Easy, now.

How tiny the Monotype Caster looks on the bed of this truck!

Gulp.

Tim Schaefer (my dad) steadies as I try to figure out the odd angle.

Alas, Bill Welliver with the come along to pull it off the bed of the rollback.

More come-along plus brute force.

Hey there’s Reed Dixon on the right. Where’d he come from? Good timing!

I often wonder about the possibility of combining my varied interests to create something more meaningful, more lasting, than any one avocation ever has the chance to produce. Last night while looking at my partial schematic of the former Reading & Columbia Railroad that runs through Lititz I thought the text labels on the diagram might be more understandable if I rotated them 90 degrees. This felt like the first time I thought about the railroad as a designer, not simply a rail fan. Within a short time I transformed my barely serviceable sketch into an a more lucid and artful interpretation of the subject at hand. I don’t expect that a “map” like this could matter much to anyone else, but I feel compelled to pursue the idea a bit further, and to eventually take it into the letterpress shop.

Stay tuned.

It is a small pedestal machine.

Friedrich Deckel. Type G.I. Machine No. 2751.

A close-up of the pantograph arms with engraved graduated scale.

The spindle mechanism.

The spindle is easily removed from the machine.

Top half of the spindle assembly, disassembled (gulp!)…

…and the bottom half of the spindle assembly. Spindle arbor and pulley should separate but are too tight to remove by hand.

A very few samples of recent work…

Digital illustration, printed letterpress from metal plate, private commission. Click for detail.

Wood engraving, hand set metal type, copper photo-engraving for 2nd color, printed letterpress. Click for enlargement (~200kb).

Handset wood and metal type, printed letterpress, private commission.

Linoleum cut with handset metal type, private edition & Amalgamated Printers’ Association bundle submission.

Hand set metal type, Amalgamated Printers’ Association bundle submission.

Here’s a small linoleum cut that I just finished. This peony will illustrate a collaborative letterpress piece I am doing with J C Groff. In the final piece the peony will print white on a medium toned paper. The body, typeset by Jim, is excerpted from a letter he sent to me. One hundred fifty finished prints will be submitted to the APA. I’ll try to remember to post the finished piece. And yes, I did notice that it has been exactly six months since I last posted to the site. Ouch.

Some wood type in the composing stick. I perpetually grapple, doodle, diddle, shuffle and fret over the words that might describe what I do. “Image & Type” is one recent candidate. It sets a nice tone, I think, but it still needs to be qualified by a title like

Ian Schaefer, Designer & Letterpress Printer.

Yet does any of this fairly cover my efforts in web design? Brand identity?

Posted some photos of the old Deckel pantographic engraver that I recently brought into my shop. It needs some work, but will eventually, hopefully, be used to cut matrices or punches for the creation of new designs in metal printing type.

The scene is always changing in this shop. This is how it looked in February, 2005—a little cramped. On the right, in the background, is the recently acquired, pre-war Deckel pantographic engraver , which I am hoping to bring back to life. Someday it will be used to engrave brass matrices—or punches which in turn will be driven to form matrices—for casting new metal printing types of my own design. Casting type will eventually be accomplished with Monotype equipment like the composition machine that arrived here last spring.

A view of the shop, February, 2005.

Works in progress, a.k.a. piles of type.

Knowing how seriously delinquent I am in showing some examples of my letterpress printing on this site, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that one of my recent submissions to the Amalgamated Printers’ Association (APA) bundle is shown on the APA website. As you will see if you follow the link, this “Title Page Project” required participants to use only the copy provided, and to print on a 5 × 8 page.

I thought this was a great study project, not only because I have a strong desire to print books, but also because it presented a few realistic constraints from which a myriad of solutions would evolve. Looking at others’ solutions in relation to my own is very revealing to me. I would really like to see the APA sponsor more of challenges like this one; it may help to encourage the development of real skills in budding printers like myself.

Here is the solution to the typefaces wordsearch puzzle I composed for the yet-to-be-published 2004 ATF Conference keepsake. I think it is a fairly tough puzzle: a 15 × 15 grid containing 31 words. You can generate your own wordsearches, and many other types of puzzles with Discovery School’s Puzzle maker. It used to be free.

ATF Conference 2004 – Typefaces Wordsearch

I hope you’ve enjoyed my typefaces wordsearch from the 2004 keepsake. How many faces did you find? Ten? Twenty? Don’t give up yet! There are a total of thirty-one arranged forward, backward, upward, downward and diagonally. Below you’ll find the puzzle—minus the unused letters—and the list of words hidden therein. If you simply can’t wait any longer, the solution is posted here.

A special nod to Discovery School’s very nifty Puzzlemaker for help arranging so many words in such a tight grid.

Blado

Bulmer

Caslon

Deepdene

Eusebius

Fournier

Garamond

Hadriano

Homero

Ionic

Janson

Kaatskill

Klang

Legend

Louvaine

Metrothin

Nicolas Cochin

Old Dutch

Orplid

Perpetua

Privat

Quadrata

Rhapsodie

Rondo

Scotch Roman

Solemnis

Tippecanoe

Trajanus

Union Pearl

Vanity Fair

Zapf Civilite