Cary Graphic Arts Collection

I recently had the chance to spend the day visiting the Cary Graphic Arts Collection housed at the Rochester Institute of Technology.  Located in the western New York city of Rochester, the Cary Graphics Arts Collection is one of the country's finest special collections libraries focusing on graphic arts. With over 40,000 volumes and an impressive collection of personal papers, I had a hard time fitting everything I wanted to see in one day.

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Egyptian Border

The Wells College Book Arts Center has a pretty amazing collection of type. As a student in their Wells Summer Institute program it was a real joy to see and work with such rare type. One of the jewels in their collection is a complete Egyptian Border designed by Herman Ihlenburg for MacKellar, Smiths, & Jordan, circa 1881. This style of border was short lived, only produced for about a decade, making it very rare today.

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Children's Hospital Broadside 2015

Now in its fifth year this project is a partnership between letterpress printers from the School of Visual Concepts and the Seattle Arts and Lectures' Writers in the Schools program. Pediatric patients work with poets Sierra Nelson and Ann Teplick to write poems as part of their stay at Seattle Children's Hospital. This is ongoing work for the poets who work with the patients. At year end a select group of poems are chosen to be illustrated in broadsides by letterpress printers and are bound in a portfolio.

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Big Border Sampler

he School of Visual Concepts has a really nice collection of metal type ornaments. I’ve been wanting to work more with the borders specifically and decided to print a sampler– mostly for the sheer fun of seeing what they all look like, but also as a resource for future projects.

I poked through the collection and chose borders that I especially wanted to see printed, and then moved on to others that showed the variety of the collection. Many of the borders are designed to be used in different combinations and directions. I believe most of them have been typeset in a traditional way, but in some cases I doubled or tripled up a line for aesthetic reasons.

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