I love variety of typographic ornament found on those books, the attention to details and the perfect clean layouts. Examples below go through 1903′s leather bound bible, featuring gothic typography, book cover’s illustration hot foil stamping, beautifully balanced page layouts to amazing front cover’s title drop cap.

Overall, a beautiful collection of historical typefaces, ornaments, icons and layout inspiration and know how.

Ccredits:

• colymba logo set in Triple Condensed Gothic Bold by Red Rooster type foundry
• reverse text set in Solano Gothic Bold by MVB type foundry
• paper and duplexing by Büttenpapierfabrik Gmund
• letterpress by Typoretum

This great edition – first published in 1987 -reminds me in some ways to Robert Bringhurst‘s The Element of Typographic Style, but in a more straight to the point way (and maybe less in depth).

Sample chapters include the reading process, line composition and column type setting; all chapter and reflections illustrated with rich examples.

Written and designed by Jost Hochuli (graphic designer/typographer from the “modern Swiss typography”), Detail in Typography is available from Hyphen Press, Amazon, Typotheque and many other retailer and in various languages.

With the same concept, Underware, the design collective author of fabulous typefaces, managed to ‘manufacture’ blood offset ink. For the sampler of their typeface Fakir, a book on the theme of voluntary suffering, The book of war, written byRuud Linssen, will be printed with the author’s blood.

A brilliant, concept and execution!

(Image from Underware)

It uses Javascript to substitute the fonts of your website. It still might not be the best solution but it seems to work pretty well, the colymba.com blog now uses Adelle by TypeTogether for its headers.

The Tee features a big bright yellow ligature Ampersand, House Industries’ ‘landmark’ glyph, all nicely printed on a black (cotton) t-shirt.

In the package with this gorgeous piece of apparel, was the House Industries’ catalogue issue 59. This time with a purple jacket which actually match pretty closely the Cordovan colour of the Jersey Cover stock talked about previously (this might not have been such a bad guess originally…).

Also included, some cool House stickers, and a promotional foldout poster/brochure, printed 3 colours + metallic gold on 1 side and full colour + metallic gold on the inside, all on a linen textured stock. This foldout promotes the range of products inspired by the work of Alexander Girard, a designer once involve in fabric pattern to 3D design.

Grab your own tee!

In today’s mail was the new House Industries‘ typeface catalogue or ‘typographical treasure’. A beautiful 114x213mm piece of print and design. House Industries is a type foundry based in Yorklyn, DE and they use this little booklet to showcase their font collection (love the Studio Sable). This was printed with 2 colours on the cover and 2 spots (with one metallic bronze) on the inset, with the addition of a subtle layer of varnish on the cover. They mention the stock used for the cover ‘Riegel Jersey plate’, a red leather textured stock, but I could not find a manufacturer or distributor online. The closer I got was with this Jersey Cover by FiberMark. Would love to know the actual paper mill/manufacturer and any link.

One thing I love, is the smell of fresh print. Each print/paper has its own tactile signature, but also olfactory. And this one is no exception, or actually is as it smells like walnut. It has this distinct nutty smell that I think matches well the organic quality of the graphics and typeface presented. Not sure if this is done on purpose or how it happen at all.

Also needs to be mentioned, House Industries also produce beautiful design objects and cool clothing (can’t wait to get my t-shirt delivered).

Loved the variety, in texture, face, techniques… from very carefully hand carved text in stone, hand sewn calligraphic letter-forms, chaotic/damaged letter shapes, ornaments and mosaics to rusty metal modern type.

Even came across an old typographic workshop.