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Dard Hunter Discovers
Hand Papermaking, Typography & Printing
Disillusioned with the commercialism of the Roycrofters and
eager to set out on his own, Hunter returned to Vienna in
1910. After taking courses in lithography, book decoration,
and letter design at the K.K. Graphische Lehrund Versuchsanstalt
(Royal-Imperial Graphic Teaching and Experimental Institute),
he moved to London.
There, he was successful in finding design work with the Norfolk
Studios. On a spring day in 1911, Hunter wandered into the
Science Museum and saw the hand papermaking and type-foundry
exhibits. Fascination with the appliances of these crafts
papermaking moulds and watermarks, steel punches, copper matrices,
hand-held type casting molds inspired Hunter to learn more
about these centuries-old arts. The British Museum library
provided Hunter with all the information he could have desired,
and it was there that he examined incunabula books printed
before 1500.
For the first time Hunter felt the fine papers thin but strong
with beautifully textured surfaces. The impression of the
metal type into those papers gave each sheet a tactile quality
completely absent in modern, machine-made books. With every
book examined, Hunter amassed sensual visual and tactile references
which led him to a deep appreciation for the important role
paper played in books.
This study led him to visit Lucien Pissarro's Eragny Press
and T.J. Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker's Doves Press.
Years later Hunter recalled this event in his autobiography,
My Life with Paper. "The work of the English private
presses was of keen interest to me, and I felt I should like
to attempt something of the kind myself. I was convinced,
however, that simply purchasing type from a commercial foundry
and buying paper from a paper mill left too many of the vital
steps of making books in the hands of disinterested workmen.
It was my desire to have my own private press, but I wanted
my work to be individual and personal, without reliance upon
outside help from the type founder or papermaker. I would
return to America and attempt to make books by hand completely
by my own labor paper, type, printing." *In fact when
Hunter left London in late 1911, he had no real thoughts of
printing books; he simply wanted to experiment making paper
and type by hand. Within a few months of his return, he purchased
an historic house on a farm in Marlborough-on-Hudson, New
York. In the spring of 1912 Hunter moved there with his wife,
Edith.
By 1913 Hunter had built a 16 x 14 foot papermill on Jew's
Creek across the road from the 1714 house, Wolfert's Roost.
He fashioned the mill after the half-timbered and thatched
buildings he saw while on a walking tour of the Cotswolds
in 1911. Not wanting to compromise his goal to manufacture
paper using 17th century techniques, Hunter relied entirely
upon a water wheel to provide power to the mill.
He purchased hand papermaking moulds from England, and in
his spare time experimented with watermarks. At first he purchased
half-beaten pulp from England, but soon switched to new rags
of cotton and linen purchased in America. Hunter experimented
with different rag processing steps including chemical cooking.
He utilized a Hollander beater, the only machine used in the
mill to macerate a load of rags to pulp. Once the sheets were
formed and as much water removed as possible, they were taken
to the attic of the house and hung on lines to dry.
During that first year by varying the processing chemistry
and beating times, Hunter soon had numerous types of paper.
He also experimented with aniline dyes, creating special effects
with different colored pulps. These papers look contemporary
to us, and Hunter might have been the first person to work
with pulp in this way.
An early letterhead announced that the Dard Hunter Mill could
made papers for bookbinding, "papestry [?]," intaglio
and letterpress printing as well as custom watermarked papers.
Word spread to the nearby artists' community, the Elverhöj
Colony at Milton, that Hunter was making paper. As there was
no other mill in America making paper by hand, Hunter was
soon swamped with orders. But however much Hunter wanted to
fill these, he could not because the water supply was much
less than expected and unpredictable. During the winter months,
work in the mill came to a complete halt, and Hunter retreated
to the warmth of his house to work on his type.
Work on his font of type actually began in late 1911, and
after moving to Marlborough, he set up his type-foundry and
press in the house across the road from the papermill. This
house, called Wolfert's Roost when he purchased the property
in 1912, had been built by a Jewish merchant, Gomez, in 1714.
In 1914 Hunter changed the name to Mill House by which it
is still known.
Hunter knew of and admired Albrecht Dürer's alphabet
and found it illustrated in Edward Strange's Alphabets.
A Manual of Lettering, a copy of which he purchased in
London. As the Dürer models were illustrated in uppercase
only, Hunter's sources for the lowercase letters and numerals
were inspired by the Venetian romans (as opposed to italics)
of 15th century typographers such as Nicolas Jenson and Erhard
Ratdolt. He decided to make his type 18-point, an appropriate
size for letterheads and paper ream labels, although rather
large for text.
It took Hunter four years to cut 63 punches. A punch is a
soft steel bar onto the end of which is lightly incised the
shape of the letter in reverse. If there is a void in the
letter, such as for the O P R a q, etc., a counterpunch, the
end of which is filed into the shape of the void, is driven
into the punch. To remove the excess metal from the edges
of the letter, files are used, and to finish, gravers.
Periodically Hunter made smoke proofs to see how the letter
was taking shape. These proofs were made by holding the punch
above the flame of a candle. Soot accumulated on the face
of the punch, and when he pressed it on paper, the image of
the letter, right-reading, could be evaluated. In many cases
he used the margins of books he consulted to check his progress.
In late 1915 when he finished cutting the punches, Hunter
had all of the letters, lower and uppercase, except for the
Q X and Z. He also cut two R's. All of the lowercase letters
were cut. He cut no italics; ligatures, e.g., _, Æ;
or accented letters, e.g., ü. When he needed the latter,
he altered a few pieces of type.
Punches for all of the numbers were cut except 6 and zero.
The 6 was printed using the cast piece of type, 9, upside
down. The zero was the cast lowercase o with the inside of
the bowl reamed out with a graver to create an even thinness
of line. Although a punch for 1 was cut, it was never cast;
instead the cast i served after the dot was filed off.
Once the punches were cut, Hunter hardened each and struck
it into a bar of copper. This impressed the letter, right-reading,
into the softer metal. This bar is called a matrix. As the
striking creates distortion in the bar, the matrices have
to be justified to make all sides parallel and the impression
the correct depth.
The next step was to cast the pieces of type using the matrices
and a mold. He prepared the type metal using a recipe from
Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, or the Doctrine
of Handy-Works (1683). This alloy was composed of lead,
tin, antimony, copper, and iron. The hand-held mold Hunter
used was one he had made himself modeled after an early 19th
century mold.
When viewed as a whole, Hunter's font displays irregularities
in both the size and shape of some letters, but he did not
want his type to be identical to the modern foundry types
made by machine. Rather he wanted to capture the essence of
the early typefaces which he said possessed "a freedom
of stroke unknown today." Printed on handmade paper,
Hunter's typeface is lively, rhythmic, and sculptural. It
reminds us of those early printed pages where the hand of
the punch-cutter can be seen as well as felt.
* Dard Hunter, My Life with Paper. (New York: Alfred Knopf,
1958), 56-57.
page 4 > Dard Hunter Makes World's
First "One-Man" Books
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