Based in San Francisco, Letterform Archive is a nonprofit center for inspiration, education, and community. As a special collections library, museum, publisher, and school, our mission to share the joy of letters with design-curious people. Founded in 2015 by Rob Saunders, the Archive began with his private collection of 15,000 objects with the public. The collection has since grown to over 100,000 items related to lettering, typography, calligraphy, and graphic design, spanning thousands of years of history.
Type specimens from around the world are a core aspect of the Archive’s collection. In this talk, Associate Curator Stephen Coles will uncover some wood type gems that have rarely been seen before, including catalogs from European and Indian manufacturers. Feast your eyes on dazzling chromatics, film-to-wood conversions, and other curiosities.
Then, Saunders will share the work of Jack Stauffacher, whose striking typographic experiments transformed letters from legibility workhorses into expressive studies of surface, color, and form. A special traveling edition of the Archive’s upcoming exhibition, Typographic Jazz, will also be on display in the Hamilton gallery, and copies of Only on Saturday, the first comprehensive book of Stauffacher’s wood type prints, will be available.
