Origins of Manufactured Woodletter

Wood was prob­a­bly the first mate­r­i­al used to cre­ate print­ing sur­faces. In the mov­able type era, wood tem­plates were impressed in sand, and filled with hot met­al to cre­ate the largest let­ters need­ed by print­ers. Eng­lish let­ter foundries were offer­ing up to 18 line (3″) types cast in this way, but the char­ac­ters were heavy and prone to break. Indi­vid­ual let­ters could be cut by hand in wood, but this was a very slow and expen­sive process.

The inven­tion of the router for cut­ting woodlet­ter in the US opened up the pos­si­bil­i­ty of stan­dard faces, cut in mul­ti­ple sizes a lot more quick­ly than had been pos­si­ble ear­li­er. The mate­ri­als were less expen­sive and the fin­ished prod­uct had a bet­ter and more even sur­face than met­al equiv­a­lents. In 1828, Dar­ius Wells of New York issued the first cat­a­logue of woodlet­ter.

The first UK woodlet­ter mak­er looks to be Egling­ton of Lon­don, sup­pli­er to the Caslon Let­ter Foundry around 1870.

DeLittle in the UK

Robert Dun­can DeLit­tle was born in York in April 1868. While work­ing in Ade­laide, Aus­tralia between 1885 and 1887, he devel­oped a new way of cut­ting ​‘white let­ter’. This is a spe­cialised form of woodlet­ter cre­at­ing a ban­ner effect where the let­ters are white against a print­ed back­ground. The prob­lem with white let­ter was that the joins in each char­ac­ter had a ten­den­cy to show because the joins fol­lowed the edge of each let­ter. DeLit­tle’s inno­va­tion was to move the joins to with­in the white space. This made the assem­bly more com­plex, because now dif­fer­ent com­po­nents were need­ed for each com­bi­na­tion of let­ters (like a U and an M) rather than for each let­ter. That said, the result was much neater.

In June 1888 Robert returned to the UK and took premis­es near his father’s print­ing works to man­u­fac­ture his white let­ter in York. His first order, in Feb­ru­ary 1889 was sent back to F T Wim­ble in Aus­tralia. Much of his 1889 cus­tom was sell­ing to oth­er print­ers’ sup­pli­ers in the UK and some for anoth­er woodlet­ter man­u­fac­tur­er, Day & Collins.

In June 1889, Robert bought stocks of hard­wood — birch and sycamore — and print­ed the first spec­i­men sheets a month lat­er.

As the busi­ness grew, Robert became aware that the focus on white let­ter might be sup­ple­ment­ed with more ​‘usu­al’ styles of woodlet­ter. Some more usu­al types were cre­at­ed, ref­er­ences № 51, 52 and 53 in 1892.

In 1899 the firm moved to their pur­pose-built fac­to­ry at Vine Street in York.

By 1900 the firm offered 42 faces. DeLit­tle nev­er employed their own sales force: sell­ing either though agents who were paid on com­mis­sion or through oth­er print­ers’ sup­pli­ers.

By the 1980s, DeLit­tle became Britain’s only woodlet­ter mak­er, the firm being run by Jim DeLit­tle, Robert’s grand­son. By this point DeLit­tle was offer­ing 300 faces, includ­ing in mul­ti­ple scripts.

With no-one able to car­ry on the busi­ness, DeLit­tle’s closed. The machin­ery, includ­ing pan­tographs and the pat­terns for each face went to the Type Muse­um in Lon­don in 1996.

Jim DeLit­tle passed away in 2014.

The Woodletter Business

The process of going from design to woodlet­ter is painstak­ing. Draw­ings are devel­oped, and from these wood­en tem­plates. Tem­plates are ​‘mas­ters’ and a pan­to­graph is used to scale these up or down accord­ing­ly. At their ear­ly premis­es, DeLit­tle had a fire­proof room like­ly to store these tem­plates.

Ear­ly wood pur­chas­es were birch and sycamore. By the 1980s French horn­beam or Cana­di­an maple were being used. The wood was cut to 1¼″ thick sheets and allowed to mature for five years. One face of the wood was fin­ished to take the cut­ting of the char­ac­ter.

The com­bi­na­tion of the tem­plate, the pan­to­graph and the carv­ing of wood gives a basic char­ac­ter. This has to be planed to type-high and then fin­ished by hand, for exam­ple, to carve out or deep­en the coun­ters. This is then soaked in lin­seed oil, and proofed on an Albion press using car­bon paper to avoid ink­ing the type. The mak­ers mark is applied to the ​“A” char­ac­ter of each fount.

Type was sold in ​‘dozens’, and char­ac­ter height is expressed in lines, one line equal to 12pt. DeLit­tle man­u­fac­tured types from 1 line (12pt) to 180 line (2​′6″).

Spec­i­men books were pro­duced by print­ing sheets of spec­i­mens and assem­bling these peri­od­i­cal­ly in to books. This makes dat­ing books espe­cial­ly dif­fi­cult as a sin­gle book issued in, say, 1950 might include spec­i­men sheets dat­ing from the 1930s as well as more mod­ern faces. An exam­ple spec­i­men book is avail­able through type.org.uk.

Perspex-Faced Woodletter

Exam­ple here from friends at St Bride Library:

DeLit­tles of York made very good wood type, but they also offered Per­spex options. This box of sam­ples shows part of their range in plas­tic. Per­spex type attracts much less inter­est sec­ond-hand — and far low­er prices. pic.twitter.com/nhXLiFGk0g

— St Bride Foun­da­tion (@stbridefdn) May 5, 2022

Woodletter Makers Today

While DeLit­tle’s col­lec­tion cur­rent­ly is host­ed by the under-threat Type Muse­um in Lon­don, there are mod­ern UK mak­ers of woodlet­ter. I can hap­pi­ly vouch for each!

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Location

Vine Street, York as the man­u­fac­to­ry for Delit­tle.

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Head­er Image: ​“Mar­que Delit­tle York” flickr pho­to by Amper­sand Press Lab https://flickr.com/photos/ampersandpresslab/32993285306 shared under a Cre­ative Com­mons (BY-NC) license