Type Archived: A visual journey through typographic history is the definitive account of London’s legendary Type Archive. Authored by long-serving Archive volunteer, Richard Ardagh, the book provides a fascinating visual tour of traditional typefounding, tracing the origins of typography and the printed word.

With specially commissioned photography, Type Archived sheds light on the organisation’s extraordinary materials, celebrating their significance and importance to both the history of art and engineering.

To celebrate the book’s publication, Unit’s Adrian Shaughnessy talked to Richard about the Archive, the processes involved in making metal type and the compilation of Type Archived, which is available now from Volume via vol.co.

Founded in London in 1992, the Type Archive brought together some eight million artefacts that tell the story of typography and printing. Highlights of the collection, which sadly closed in 2023, included the ancient materials of typefounders Stephenson Blake, the hot-metal technology of The Monotype Corporation and the innovative woodletter produced by the factory of Robert DeLittle.

Adrian Shaughnessy: Can you give a brief description of the Type Archive?

Richard Ardagh: The Type Archive was established in the 1990s as a crusade to save the remains of the UK’s typefounding industry (the tools and machinery once used to make printing type in huge quantities). It began with the hot-metal plant of The Monotype Corporation, followed by the ancient artefacts of Stephenson Blake and the woodletter factory of Robert DeLittle.

The site in Stockwell, South London, held over eight million items: steel punches, bronze matrices, copper patterns, lead and wooden type, not to mention the cast-iron machinery – tonnes and tonnes of heavy metal!

The Type Archive closed in 2023 so really the book is a memorial to the material that was in use there and has now been removed to deep storage, and the skills of employees that had spent decades practicing their craft. Hopefully the book will encourage people’s appreciation for the history of both typography and engineering, and perhaps inspire some to find new ways for it to continue.

AS: You were trained in the digital era. What drew you to the world of pre-digital type?

RA: I’d experienced letterpress briefly as a student at Central St Martins, but it was meeting Graham Bignell, founder of New North Press, and the environment there that really encouraged me to pursue it. I still remember the feeling of discovery: delving through cabinets of fonts, coming face to face with the solid physical origins of things familiar to me from the screen. Holding type in my hands made design feel real to me.

AS: Your book is a hymn to the wonderful craft of typography before it became digital and when it was still a manual and mechanical process. What can someone currently working as a typographer or graphic designer learn from your book?

RA: A lot of people with an interest in typography will be familiar with the aesthetics of a typeface’s appearance. They may know who designed it, famously used it, or feel affiliated to it from having used it themselves. The book is really about what comes before that – the craft that enabled those shapes exist, be easily reproduced and have their qualities passed on. It’s the origin story of all the type that we can manipulate so easily on screen today.

‘Engineering the Word’ is how the Type Archive’s founder Sue Shaw described it, because for hundreds of years the conquering of physical materials and processes was the only way to achieve words on a page. To me, the objects in the book are like the jewellery of the industrial age. The wild inventiveness of design styles is there, but so is the hidden creativity and diligence involved in the techniques that helped make each letter, number and punctuation mark a reality.

AS: You have some vivid descriptions of the painstaking process of making metal type and how a single letterform requires amazing manual skill. Inevitably, this results in tiny imperfections. Today, with digital fonts, everything is perfect. Have we lost something?
 
RA: I appreciate the huge advances of digital technology – I’m no Luddite – but because computers are all about efficiency, inevitably this leads to shortcuts. There’s something fascinating about how traditional typefounding required a design to be passed through multiple materials before it ended up on the page – every letter of every font (at every size) had a drawing, pattern, punch, matrix and types to be able to finally appear in print.

Each of those stages was tangible and required the skill of the hand and mind. That level of diligence feels so far from our digital lives now. 

AS: You note that casting metal type was only economical up to a certain point size. Then came woodblock type which allowed large type for display purposes to be made. Apart from size, what are the qualities that differentiate metal from wood type?

RA: Well, by the late 19th century the production of metal type was effectively precision engineering, accurate to ten-thousandths of an inch. Cutting woodletter was comparatively crude, but fine for larger sizes.

People often associate letterpress with ‘distressed’ type, characteristic of woodletter that’s seen better days. Unused wooden types do dry out, so continued printing with oil-based inks actually helps their preservation. Metal type lasts well too, as long as you don’t drop it and keep it away from moisture and extreme temperatures. Looked after, printing type will long outlive us.


AS: You mention Ian Gabb. I know Ian from my time at the RCA – he runs the Letterpress department at the College. I was always struck by how the students (digital natives) became enchanted when exposed to the joy of setting type by hand under Ian’s tuition. Is this your experience?

RA: Absolutely. I think almost everyone enjoys learning through doing. Letterpress is like a jigsaw that can be solved in infinite ways and working with limitations – having only a set amount of each letter in a fount, for example – is great for creativity. 

AS: You quote Beatrice Warde – a major figure in the development of typography in the UK. She wrote: ‘Type well used is invisible as type, just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas.’ Today we expect type to have its own character and semiotic message. In many instances – commercial and cultural – the choice of typeface is as important as the language used. Is her comment still relevant today?

RA: I think so. That quote really applies to book typography and long passages of text. Attention-grabbing ‘display’ fonts will always be needed, but the honing of type that’s comfortable to read as long-form texts is a particular skill, and one that’s been passed down and refined over centuries.

AS: Sue Shaw was the founder of the Type Archive. Can you give a brief description of her? She was an inspiring individual and a talented book designer.
 
RA: I would describe Sue Shaw as ‘a bold character’ (the name of an exhibition of her work we held last year to celebrate her life). She was small but strong, with a sharp eye and wit, and dedicated her life to keeping the Type Archive going (she died in 2020 before its eventual closure). As Nicholas Barker says in the book’s introduction: ‘Sue was fearless in taking on what she was told was impossible. Her real aim was to share the delight she got from what she did.’

Type Archived was successfully crowdfunded on the Volume platform at the end of 2024, thanks to the support of 374 backers, and is now available to purchase from the vol.co site in limited numbers.