For the Love of Type and Material
An Interview with Matt Rieck & Geri McCormick of Virgin Wood Type
This week, TypeThursday sat down with Matt Rieck & Geri McCormick of Virgin Wood Type. It was a great conversation about producing new wood typefaces today, why they love this technology and the rich printing culture of upstate New York.
TypeThursday: Great to have you guys. Thank you deeply for coming here to talk on TypeThursday.
Matt Rieck: Thanks for having us.
Geri McCormick: Great to be here.
TT: Let’s first talk about what have you guys been doing at Virgin Wood Type in the last year. What are each of yours role at Virgin Wood Type?
MR: Sure. Because it’s a two-person operation, we both do just about everything. There are a few things that only I do or some things that only Geri does. When I came on with Geri in 2013, I started by cutting wood type only. Since then, I’ve moved into doing everything from preparing the wood blanks so that we have them for making the actual type to many other things. The one thing that I do that Geri doesn’t is the hand finishing, or hand trimming as we refer to it. The pantograph router bit is round and does not make corners when you’re cutting, so I need to use a wood carving knife or punches as we call them to make 90º angles or any other acute or sometimes obtuse angles. That’s all done by hand. I also do the writing of the blogs for our site, take photographs for the website and Geri cleans them up in Photoshop. We’re pretty complementary in what I do well or she does well and things I hate to do, she doesn’t mind doing and vice versa.
TT: I noticed that you’ve worked with contemporary type designers like Paul Shaw and House Industries producing their digital fonts and made into these wood fonts, correct?
GM: Yeah, with Paul Shaw, he was a demonstrator and speaker at the Hamilton Wayzgoose, maybe this was five years ago now. He has designed some alphabets. My husband and I just really hit it off with Paul and spent a lot of time with him over the weekend. By Saturday night into many cocktails and just talking type, he said, “I want one of my faces to be in wood type.” Paul threw out Kolo, one of his alphabets, and then when we looked at it, we realized there would be no hand trimming involved. That is a double-edged sword, which I’ve really begun to learn, in the no hand trimming, because particularly like in a font like Buffalo we have to go in with a second or third bit for each letter which is time consuming. You cut the letter, then you change the bit in the pantograph and cut more and then you change the bit in the pantograph again and you cut more. So it takes probably about the same amount of time as hand trimming letters.
The Buffalo font happened the same way as with Paul Shaw. We were at the Hamilton Wayzgoose and Ken Barber from House Industries was speaking about what they do at House. I fell in love with their fonts. Rich Kegler, I don’t know if you know him, of P22 Type Foundry, knew that House had the Buffalo font which seems to be a natural to be made into wood type because it is a font designed in the 1960s by Ed Benguiat but based on wood type from the nineteenth century. Kegler introduced me to Ken, and I asked if Virgin could make the Buffalo font. It’s just perfect to take it back to its origins and offer it in wood type. I talked to Ken and he seemed to be up for it, but he had to ask his partners. Now we’re offering it. The Buffalo font is kind of an interesting one, because right now at the Cary Graphic Arts Collection at the Rochester Institute of Technology there is an exhibit of Ed Benguiat’s work, because Ed donated all of his drawings of type development to the Cary Collection. The show is on view right now of his work and the Buffalo font will be in the show, so that’s kind of exciting.
TT: My impression is that you guys have this great love and passion for wood type. It matters a lot for you. If I could ask, why do you love it so much?
GM: Well, it does have a tactile quality and a beauty, but I’m going to say that I always describe to people that there was this crazy type revolution, an explosion of craziness in type design that happened in the Victorian Era and you see it give birth in wood type. I compare it to the explosion of type design that happened once Fontographer came out on the Macintosh in the 1980s, because it kind of opened up type design to so many more people than it was available to before. When that was going on, I was a young designer and involved and loving all the crazy stuff that was happening in type design and not caring for Victorian design. Later in my career as a designer I began to appreciate Victorian typography. I think it is so ironic, how you go from not liking Victorian typography to being in love with it.
TT: What about Victorian typography did you not like before?
GM: I thought it was all too ornate. Because as a designer, I was not that much into real ornate typography or design. Now in my own work, I do a lot of the print work for the Virgin Wood Type, but I, in general, how I use wood type is to create kind of art images with it. So then I go full-blown explosion to the craziness of the Victorian type, which I’ve, again as I said, fallen in love with. I’m using it in a different form.
TT: Matt, what about you? What about wood type really excites you, really motivates you?
MR: Well, for me, it was more of an evolution, because I was first more drawn to metal type and I tend to like more concrete things. I viewed metal type as more concrete. Then, as I started to work here, I developed more of a love for wood type. I also have an obsessive-compulsive love of wood and the grain of wood. That’s always been a part of my life and so when I came here to work with Geri, it just all fell into place. My love of wood, my love of type and letterform and working with it, making that into wood. As I have become more steeped in it by working here, I’ve come to appreciate it on a whole new level. And what we do now, versus what was done 125 years ago, little has changed in the production aspect of it, but to think of what we do now and what they did then, and we have so much more technology available to us, it just blows my mind. It creates such beautiful pieces of art, in many respects, and in a very similar way to how it was done 100 years ago. They’re just so unique.
Like the “g” that we talked about earlier. You could look at that “g” on a screen and you could be like, “Oh, that was nice. Somebody may have drawn that first by hand and then scanned it in and then created vectors from it.” But I look at that “g” now and I think, “Wow, probably the person sat down, sketched it out on a piece of paper and then had to go about figuring out how to make the pattern, and then from that pattern make the letter out of the piece of wood.” That’s just mind-blowing to me and it just transcends so much of what we do nowadays in our 21st-century lives.
TT: That “g” really does resonate for me, too. I can see very clearly an understanding of figuring out relationships. Harmonizing the positive and negative space in a way that makes it work.
MR: Yeah, that is another understanding of it. But what’s also amazing about that “g” is when I look at that “g” and I see the curves, but I can also see the shoulders and the wood block itself. When that “g” is printed, you’re not going to see the block. You’re not going to see all that was cut away. So to me, it’s two different levels of beauty: the piece itself and then when it’s finally printed, it’s going to look different because you’re only going to see the letterform, you’re not going to see the whole package. Geri, did you want to add?
TT: Yeah, do you want to jump on that “g” love?
GM: It has a lot of attitude.
TT: Where is that “g” currently stored?
GM: The Genesee Center for the Arts and Education, which is a community arts center. That’s a non-profit arts center that has a letterpress studio as part of it. Where I’ve been very involved in building the wood type collection for about eight years.
TT: That’s in the Rochester, New York, area?
GM: Yeah, it’s in downtown. It’s in the city of Rochester.
TT: I think a lot of people may not have the impression of the printing history and resources available in Rochester. Are there more institutions or resources in the region TypeThursday readers may not know about?
MR: Well, Geri mentioned the Cary Collection at RIT, which is a world-renowned collection for design. Not just type design, but all manner of design.
GM: And also printing history.
MR: And printing history! Oh, my goodness. I can’t believe I forgot that.
GM: And I tell everybody that really in Upstate New York here we have what I call the letterpress trail. The Genesee Center’s Printing and Book Art studio has an amazing wood type collection. We are working on putting the wood type catalogue online. The metal type catalogue is online. There’s also Wells College Book Arts Program. There’s the Bixler Letter Type Foundry, they have been a metal type foundry since 1974, and they’re in Skaneateles, New York. Then there’s Boxcar Graphics, which is in Syracuse. And there’s also Western New York Book Arts Center. So, we really have quite the concentration of amazing resources and people involved in the letterpress world all within an hour-and-a-half drive from where we are right now.
TT: And that’s all really great stuff. Guys, I want to thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Want to learn more about printing history? Check out this google map list of Geri’s Letterpress Trail
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