Wood type is inked into history

It is hard to be a newspaper person and not have a soft spot for wood type, the inexpensive and lightweight letter forms used in headlines and advertisements at a time when newspapers were booming.

For years, I've heard about the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum, but I was not prepared for what I found in an unassuming, old factory a few hours' drive north of Milwaukee.

The museum is home to 1.5 million pieces of wood type, the largest collection in the country. The museum is on the site of the Hamilton Manufacturing Co., once the nation's largest manufacturer of wood type.

The company was founded in 1880 by Ed Hamilton, who as a young man made his first pieces of type from holly wood in a back room at his mom's house. He sent samples for his "Hamilton Holly Wood Type" to papers around the country, snagging his first order from the Green Bay Gazette.

The place had the smell of my dad's workbench mixed with the unmistakably tart, metallic scent of ink. It was the mixed bouquet of handmade things, of craft, and the printed word.

Set out on tables were the little blocks of wood, each with a single letter, fat or slim, serifed or sans. You could hold them in your hands, feel the weight of them and run your fingers across the smooth face of the backward facing letters. They were sanded to a degree of polish that seems impossible for wood. Still, my fingers found the tiny dents and flaws in them, the little wrinkles of age. Inked and re-inked, each piece of type had its own patina, too.

As objects, they are beautiful. They are touchstones, relics of posters for events such as the Columbian Exposition of 1893. But they are more than artifacts.

Letters were being cut and posters pressed the weekend that I visited with my significant other, Ken Hanson, a designer and typeface aficionado. One of the apprentices was working on an announcement for a 10th anniversary. Three simple capital letters -- TEN -- were laid into the press and inked in a green somewhere between pear and olive. As the press was cranked, by hand of course, a single sheet of paper was thrust in, through and out of the press.

Flipped over for us to see, the letters had dug into the page and made a physical impression. It was a tangible, direct, three-dimensional result. These are not just pictures of letters. Then another announcement was made. One at a time. This is not a process for those in a hurry.

Nearby, Georgianne Liesch was cutting type. The daughter of Norb Brylski, a retired Hamilton type cutter, she learned from her dad and is carrying on the family tradition. With steady hands, she cut away the area around a capital "H."

The museum is one of the largest printing museums in the world, with about 30,000 square feet of space. The type ranges from minuscule to nearly the height of a man. I took a picture of Ken in front of a giant, squat Tuscan number "2" that seemed to swallow him up. Both the wood block and a printed, gray-blue impression were stunning.

As the world becomes increasingly digital, the appeal of wood type and its unique properties remain firmly rooted.