Author Stephen O. Saxe will give this year’s Philip and Frances Hofer Lecture on April 20, 2010, at 5:30 pm, in Houghton’s Edison and Newman Room. The talk is entitled “Turning Lead into Gold: Nineteenth-Century American Type Foundries and Their Specimen Books” and is free and open to the public.
From a shaky beginning in the new American republic, the type founding industry grew with westward expansion, economic development, and mechanization. In the process it produced some of the most fanciful, exuberant types ever seen. This lecture will review the development of type-founding technologies and survey the type specimen books the type foundries produced to promote their wares.