The Type Studio
The Type Studio is located in Jones Library 105 and houses our collections of metal and wood type. This is where you’ll learn all about the role and work of the compositor or typesetter. The Type Studio also serves as instruction space for class visits, orientations, and workshops on various aspects and techniques of book arts and letterpress printing.
Up-to-date book of the specimen pages we have printed of our 300+ cases of type.
Alphabetical list of our fonts and their locations (current as of September 2025)
The Anatomy of Type
from Saunders & Chiplis, For the Love of Letterpress: A Printing Handbook for Instructors and Students (2019), p.33.
Making Choices about Type
All about Type
Typefaces and Fonts
After carefully planning and designing the layout of text, the compositor selects from among many different fonts and font families. The collection of type, known as a font, is one instance of a typeface (e.g. Times New Roman, Calibri, Helvetica). The term “font” refers to the physical embodiment (whether it is a case of metal pieces or a computer file) while the term “typeface” refers to the design or the way it looks. “A font is what you use, and a typeface is what you see.” This explanation is found on Monotype.com that also hosts a helpful glossary of Typography Terms and Definitions and other informative resources like the Guide to Type Styles.
When deciding about letter style on your computer, you might select the typeface first. You might choose a clean, modern-looking typeface like Helvetica, Arial, or Verdana or a more formal or classic one like Baskerville, Bulmer, or Bodoni.
These two contrasting groups represent examples of major classifications of typefaces, the former belonging to the sans-serif group and the latter to the serif group:
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Serifs are strokes like feet, caps, or horns appearing at the extremities of the letter forms as demonstrated here in this sentence in the typeface Cambria.
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Sans-serif (“sans” meaning without) typefaces lack these strokes as seen in this sentence in the typeface Verdana.
Four main classifications of type are Serif, Sans-Serif, Script, and Decorative. All of these have more specific subsets that you can explore at myfonts.com’s type face classifications to gain a better understanding of the typefaces in our collection.
Size, Weight, Widths, and Posture
After selecting a typeface, there are more decisions to be made depending on how to communicate the message. Next, you might select the height or size of the text, which is measured in “points.” The point is a unit of measurement originating from letterpress printing and indicates the vertical measurement of the block of type on which the letter form sits. Wood type, however, is measured in lines or picas (pronounced “p-eye-kah"). The term pica has been used in typography since the middle of the 16th century!
1 pica =12 points
72 points = 1 inch
1 inch = 6 pica = 6 lines
Most metal type is cast in sizes up to 72 point with larger type manufactured in wood. Our Metal type collection ranges in size from 6 point up to an unusually large 120 point. Our collection of wood type ranges from 6 line to 25 line. In the rest of the letterpress universe, picas are used to represent fixed horizontal measurements, like column widths or the length of spacing material used to create separation between lines of text.
You might also make selections about the posture of the lettering, whether upright (often referred to as Roman) or oblique/italic (leaning forward, often generically referred to as italic, though italic is normally used with serif fonts and and oblique normally used with sans serif fonts). You could also make decisions about the weight of the typeface which refers to the heaviness of the stroke but often used to refer to different styles within the typeface like light, bold, condensed, etc. Here are some commonly-encountered weights in approximate increasing order: Hairline, UltraThin, UltraLight, Thin, Extra Light, Light, Regular, Book, Medium, Semibold or Demibold, Bold, Extra Bold, Heavy, Black, ExtraBlack, UltraBold or Ultra (from Abbreviations in Font Names: The Definitive Guide). This is particularly helpful when you encounter weight variants in a typeface like Spartan Black and Spartan Semibold. Width of a font is influenced by the weight, but you'll also see fonts that indicate width by labels such as extended or condensed.
Unlike on your computer, physical type has some unique limitations. First, you can’t just change the typeface, or even the size or weight, with the click of a button! Each of those choices are a completely different drawer of type (known as a case of type). Cabinets of type cases can be arranged in an infinite number of ways. They may be arranged in a seemingly haphazard way (which may reflect the order in which they arrived, or grouped by families, or by sizes), so it can be daunting or seem like a scavenger hunt.
Out of Sorts
A second unique limitation is that unlike on your computer, you won’t have unlimited amounts of each letter. Often the larger the size type, the fewer of each letter. Individual pieces of metal type are called sorts and if you’ve ever heard of being “out of sorts” - this is perhaps the origin story of that phrase – meaning you’ve run out of enough pieces of type for the letters you need! So, before you commit to a particular font choice, you should check how many of each letter you’ll need for the words you want to print and compare that to what’s in the case. When doing so, you’ll want to consider which majuscules (capitals or uppercase) and minuscules (lowercase) you’ll need. There are some great online tools to help do the math and calculations for you! You just enter your text, and it calculates how many of each uppercase, lowercase, number, and punctuation marks appear in your text. Here are a couple of examples of these tools: “Edition's Sorts Frequency Counter" <https://www.editions.studio/sorts> and “Welliver's Sort Counter" <https://bill.welliver.org/letterpress/sortcount.pike>.
Glyphs, Characters, and Ligatures
In typography, a glyph is a specific graphical representation of a character in a particular typeface, while a character is the abstract concept of a symbol representing a letter, number or symbol. Some typefaces - especially older or more formal ones - will include glyphs known as ligatures, combinations of two or more letters joined together in a single glyph. Examples of such include ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨œ⟩ used in English and French and combinations like ⟨fl⟩, ⟨ff⟩, and ⟨ffl⟩. Ligatures can improve the joining behavior between characters to make them flow more naturally and look more visually appealing as well as prevent characters from overlapping or colliding.
Setting Type
Letterpress Commons is a really wonderful site full of all kinds of information including this really great resource: "10 Steps to Perfect Typesetting"
Typeface styles and characteristics
Another really great resource on the anatomy and classification of typefaces from www.myfonts.com:
https://www.myfonts.com/pages/fontscom-learning-fontology-level-1-type-anatomy-type-classifications
