Rick von Holdt's Foolproof Press

Hamilton Wood Type Museum just held its second annual wayzgoose. Traditionally, wayzgooses (wayzgeese?) were parties held in print shops as the printers and their apprentices prepared for winter, papering over the windows against the cold and drinking liberally at the same time. At Hamilton, the wayzgoose brings together a gaggle of wood type geeks to hear about the history of wood type, admire its use, and do a bit of printing.

Letterpress printers are a charming bunch, and none more so than Rick von Holdt of the Foolproof Press, who lives on a farm outside Des Moines. After decades of scouring print shops that had made the transition from letterpress to offset, he has accumulated a large collection of presses as well as metal and wood type, and puts it all to good use.


von Holdt's sense of humor comes through in many of his works.


Based on the work on the walls at the Hamilton, I'd say von Holdt is the dean of the wayzgoose poster. As part of the Amalgamated Printers' Association, he has printed posters for their annual wayzgoose events all over the country. Here are a couple of the many that were on display:




The quilted house on the Amana poster is made up of type borders. Clever, fun and appropriate!


Sometimes von Holdt's work shows a serious side. Click this image for a much larger version to read the words at left and see the detail of the work at right. (In case it's not obvious even at a larger size, every one of the green stems and leaves and the colorful flowers is created from a separate piece of dingbat or ornament.)

Rick von Holdt is no fool, despite the name of his press.

The Globe Collection at Hamilton

Why go to Wisconsin for a weekend in late November?

For the Wayzgoose Weekend at one of my all-time favorites, the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Two Rivers, of course. (Past posts on the museum.)


A primary reason for the event was the unveiling of a new wood type font by Matthew Carter, one of the most prominent living type designers (best known by the teeming masses for the common web fonts Verdana and Georgia, but also the phonebook font Bell Centennial, among many others).


Carter's new typeface was proof printed for the first time during the Wayzgoose. It combines two separate fonts, a positive and a negative, which can be printed together in two colors. Everyone at the Wayzgoose got to print from the letters on their choice of paper color.


During the course of the Wayzgoose, it was announced that the typeface would be named Van Lanen, in honor of the museum's founder, James Van Lanen.

One of the weekend sessions highlighted the museum's Globe Collection, which was acquired from the Globe Printing Company of Chicago.


Jim Moran, the museum's technical director, showed a group of the cuts, which were used to print posters for movies, stage shows, car racing, political parties, and circuses. The collection also includes a large number of grocery store cuts, and in general represents a unique glimpse of American commercial culture in the 20th century.

The Globe company stopped using its vast number of illustration cuts and wood type fonts in 1980. Everything was packed into large boxes or put onto pallets in layers, and then loaded into a semi trailer. Which then sat outside through 25 Chicago summers and winters.

By the time the collection was donated to the Hamilton museum, the floor of the trailer was deteriorating, making it impossible to use a pallet jack to move the boxes and pallets, so it had to be unloaded by hand. If the weather could do that to a semi, imagine what it could do the printing materials.

There are still dozens of boxes and pallets waiting to be unpacked at the museum, but a lot of progress has been made.


The plates are generally wood with a vinyl layer glued to it. The vinyl was then cut away to create a raised printing surface. This is the red plate...


...for the Asylum of Horrors stage show poster.


This is the black plate, cut from wood, for a stock car racing poster. The squares at bottom were meant for local dates and locations.

Most of the posters were two or three colors. Sometimes the collection includes all the plates; sometimes it doesn't. Maybe the others are in one of the boxes waiting to be unpacked.

Even when they're all present, one may be in such bad condition that it can't be printed.

In some cases, it's clear which ink color should be used to print each plate, while at other times, it's not, requiring some trial and error work.


The orange plate for this striking Halloween poster.


Robert Benchley, carved in wood, from the poster for the movie The Hired Wife.


Because some of the plates are warped from lack of temperature control, they sometimes can be printed best on fabric instead of paper.


Like this evil clown, which makes an excellent sweatshirt!


Some of the posters made from the Globe Collection so far are for sale on the museum's website.

For more on the Hamilton Wood Type Museum, see Nick Sherman's Woodtyper blog or the Flickr stream from the Wayzgoose Weekend.

Two Finds at the Wayzgoose

I think in all of my past mentions of the Wayzgoose at Hamilton, I may never have said exactly what a wayzgoose is. This time around I noticed there's a broadside posted at the museum that helps me answer that question:

(Click to enlarge for better readability.)

While at this years ’goose I learned a few facts I never knew. One short fact came in a presentation about "strike-on" type. 

Strike-on is any kind of type that involves metal hitting paper to make a positive image that's later pasted up to use in final reproduction (usually in offset lithography). Typewriters are considered strike-on, and in the 20th century there were also fancy typewriters — sometimes called compositors — that had variable-width characters for better spacing than on a typewriter. They could also set justified text:

In the presentation on this topic, I learned something about a famous 1948 newspaper front page:

We all know the headline, but check out the text below the headlines:

Yes, the text in those columns is not typeset with hot metal type, as was the usual practice at the time: it was done with strike-on cold type. I never noticed that!

Another presentation over the weekend covered a topic that was completely new to me: it highlighted the work of illustrator Joseph Low.

Craig Welsh of the Pennsylvania design firm Go Welsh became fascinated with Low's work and began collecting it, such as these inserts from Women's Day magazine, which appeared for years...or decades:

He connected with Low's daughter Damaris and talked with her. He arranged for her to attend the Wayzgoose at Hamilton and they tag-teamed the presentation. It was super-cool.

Clearly, Low was part of what I call cartoon modern. Given the dates of his work (like this New Yorker cover from 1940*), he was one of the earlier influences:

Low's Wikipedia page is barely more than a stub. This 2007 obituary from the Martha's Vineyard newspaper is pretty thorough. The New York Times obit, written by Steven Heller (the writer of all the design history articles, it seems) is paywalled but a friendly reader sent me a gift link (thanks!).

Welsh plans to do something — most likely a book — about Low and his work, in cooperation with Damaris. I look forward to it!

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* I can't help noticing the visual connection between Low's 1940 New Yorker cover and Virginia Lee Burton's illustrations for the The Little House (published in 1942), especially the rendering of the trees. (Her Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel had come out in 1939.) Art is an environment and they were both in it. 

Wayzgoose 2014

I never know what I'll see at Hamilton Wood Type Museum's annual Wayzgoose gathering. This year it was a report on a paper-making project in Ghana, images and ideas from a letterpress shop in Nashville that does public art, a talk about how the museum's small staff and a gaggle of volunteers moved the museum in just five months, and a virtual visit to the Tipoteca Italiana, a printing and wood type museum located a few hours from Venice, Italy.

My photos this year are not so much about the presentations as they have been in the past, although there was one by collector Greg Walter about the use of bas-relief watermarks in handmade paper that I managed to get some shots of. Often, the watermarks are meant as stand-alone works of art, particularly in Italy and Japan, or as commemoratives to honor famous people like Charles Lindbergh just after his transatlantic flight:


But the ones that fascinated me the most were on currency, including these two:


A ruble note with an image of Lenin showing through.


A bill from Suriname with a toucan peeking out of the right side.

Other than that, I mostly recorded a few of the printed pieces that decorate the walls of the museum:


This poster marks the creation of the new wood typeface, Artz, by Erik Spiekermann. It's named in honor of one of the people who was employed by Hamilton to trim the wood type while it was still in regular production (which ended in the early 1990s).


I particularly like the overlapping transparent yellow and pink inks on this poster.


Three colors printed on brown kraft cardstock. Somehow, the art reminds me just a bit of the serpent in the Garden of Eden...


And black ink (appropriately) on chipboard.

The wall of wood type was recently reassembled in the museum's new space. It's hard to get it all one shot, so this will have to do:


Pretty stunning in person.

And one last thing, this beautiful sign:


It used to grace a printing business in Green Bay, Wisconsin. It was hand-painted by the proprietor, and only recently came into the museum's collection. (His sons Jim and Bill are the director and artistic director of the museum, respectively.)

If you're ever anywhere near Milwaukee or Sheboygan, or heading up to Door County, Wisconsin -- check out the Hamilton. It's worth a trip.

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Past posts about the Wayzgoose, which I've been attending for five years.

Four Photos, November 5, 2017

It's been a long day of driving back from Wisconsin, so I have just a few photos related to type and printing:


As seen in the gift shop at the Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan.


From the wall of posters printed at Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum.


One of the people attending the 2017 Wayzgoose at Hamilton. I feel compelled to explain his joke only partially: It requires knowledge of both Game of Thrones and letterpress printing.


These prints by the Itinerant Printer were on display during the print swap and sale that ends the Wayzgoose. I'm trying not to acquire posters any more (my backlog far exceeds my wall space), but I just had to take a photo because this Neil deGrasse Tyson quote reminds me of a Stephen Crane poem I identified with in high school.

New and Old Printing

I'm just home from a weekend of Wayzgoose at the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. (Wayzgoose? What's that?)

With the election just two days away, there was a lot of printing on display related to it or the general political environment. Such as this piece is by Ben Blount:


I liked the design and simplicity of this postcard on chipboard:


There's a great a contrast in size from the postcard to this piece...


...which was at least eight feet tall and had been printed with a steamroller.

This final poster is an antique rather than a reprinting of old plates:


Enquirer was a Cincinnati-based company that printed the majority of circus posters in the U.S., and the Hamilton museum now houses the collection of their plates and some printed items like this one.

If you're ever anywhere near the east side of Wisconsin, visit the Hamilton.

A Little Printing from Hamilton

It's time once again for the annual Wayzgoose at Hamilton Wood Type Museum. So far, what I have to share is the work of four print artists. Hamilton has been undergoing a major change this past year -- they had to move out of their original home, find a new place, then move 27 semi-trucks full of printing equipment. The museum is not quite open yet, but they're holding the Wayzgoose anyway as a kickoff to the reopening scheduled in the next few weeks.

First, this poster from the new and improved retail shop:


Not sure who the artist is on this, but I'll add it once I find out.

Next, a bit of purposeful misspelling by Peter Fraterdeus of Dubuque, Iowa:

That's transparent white ink printed on dampened white paper, with little bits of colored ink flecked onto the wood type before the impression.

A collection of insect prints by Bill Moran of St. Paul, Minn.:

Definitely click this one to enlarge and see the different posters, all created with pieces of wood type and often metallic inks.

And finally, this greeting card by Jen Farrel of Starshaped Press in Chicago:


Farrel's intricate designs are best appreciated by seeing her locked-up type, so check this out enlarged also.

Three More from the Bulletin Board

In this age of Zoom calls, it's hard not to become self-conscious about the background behind your head. In my case, there are two wooden doors, a bit of wall, and three bulletin boards full of stuff I've posted over the years because it meant something to me.

I've posted about a few of the items over the years (here, here, and here), but it doesn't look like I've shown these three before, so here goes:


A Jenny Holzer T-shirt promo clipping from a Walker Art Center newsletter. This is pretty old... probably from the early 1990s.


A sample of four-color chromatic type printed by Paul Akin, which he gave out at the Hamilton Wood Type Museum's Wayzgoose in 2010.


A small but meaningful tagboard print by Amos Paul Kennedy of Kennedy Prints! One of the newer pieces on the bulletin board, probably from 2017.

I also have quite an array of nametags from various conferences, but Daughter Number Three is not the name on any of them so I can't share them here.