The Hamilton Manufacturing Co. traces its roots back to the very first wood types made in the United States. Darius Wells produced the first American wood type in 1828; his business was reorganized into Wells & Webb, then acquired by William Page, later passing back to the Wells family, and finally sold to Hamilton sometime before 1880. The product of this consolidation was a type specimen book issued in 1900, Hamilton’s Catalogue No. 14, which offers a good survey of American display typography of the nineteenth century.
Open to the public is the Hamilton Wood Type Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, a collection of 1.5 million pieces of wood type maintained by volunteers of the Two Rivers Historical Society. For at-home viewing, the calendar printer Unicorn Graphics has just launched their Web Museum of Wood Types and Ornaments, which offers a sundry collection of scans and photographs of American wood types — including every page of the great Catalogue No. 14. Above, a neat synopsis of the three major approaches to creating ornamental type. At the top right, surface decoration adorns a conventional design, in this case a condensed Gothic of the kind that inspired Knockout. Left center are some concave letters that introduce systemic morphological changes to the design of the alphabet, in this case turning the curves inside out. And finally, an emulative approach at bottom left, which imitates foreign materials or techniques. (This log type is a ham-fisted imitation of Vincent Figgins’ Rustic of 1845.) I find the geometric letters more successful than the fluid ones; the lugubrious vines in the lines BIE and SIT can’t hold a candle to the work of the Master of the Creeping Tendril.