Moore Wood Type at the Iowa APA Wayzgoose
Now that I’m retired from teaching after 35 years I can finally commit all my free time to making wood type (plus the list of jobs to do around the house my wife has for me). In the six days after school was out until midnight the night before the Iowa APA Wayzgoose, I lived in the type shop 14 hours a day. I wanted to take a good amount of my existing stock to Mt. Pleasent as well as my new historic line ornaments.
My daughter, the letterpress printer, and I made the 9 hour drive from Central Ohio to SE Iowa in my son-in-law’s pickup truck. Nice truck! This was to be my first experience at selling wood type in person rather than from my online store. Erin and I are the newest members of the Amalgamated Printers’ Association who was sponsoring the Wayzgoose in the famous Printer’s Hall.
We made many new printer friends over the four day event. We also ran into some old friends who are some of the most well known letterpress printers and collectors in the United States. I have never seen such a varied assortment of printing presses. They also have several working models of all three of the historic type casting machines: Intertype, Linotype, and Ludlow. They even had a large working Babcock flatbed cylinder press and paper folder that run on steam power. The Printer’s Hall at Mt. Pleasent, Iowa is a printer’s dream come true.
The Miehle #00 at Printer's Hall
They offered workshops in many different areas and on several of the large, more complicated presses. John Finch gave Erin and me a one hour personal lesson on how the Intertype hot metal machine works. We found out it was donated by a good friend, Don Black. The Hall had recently acquired a 1907 Miehle #00, originally used for printing the newspaper in Yellow Springs, Ohio. A team of printers worked all week (and countless hours before) to get it running to print one of the Wayzgoose posters in two colors.
Erin and I took a wonderful workshop on paper marbling from Mel of Calico Press. It was one of my favorite Father/Daughter experiences this year. We talked hot type and printing with all the other partipants and I spent four days explaining the wood type cutting process and what I have learned so far about cutting wood type. They were all glad that someone was carrying on the historic process. Thanks for everyone’s ideas, feedback and purchases at the Swap!
