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(High Tide Press) Typopolis: A Journey to the City of Type. Designed and printed by John Ross. Tipoteca Italiana Fondazione and the High Tide Press. [Italy. East Hampton, New York. 2002.] Accordion fold. 13.5″ x 9.5″. Printed in many colors mostly on Fabriano A5 Disegno, with some paper by J. Barcham Green. A Vandercook type 4c, a Kobold FAG Control 525 Automatic and a Vandercook 219 were used to print this book. Wood type is used to form various designs – a castle, a factory, a city, skyscrapers, a gorge, a bridge, and a tower. Text in English, Italian and Greek from various sources. Black cloth boards, with a recess on the front board containing a “mock” plastic printer’s type block with the title printed backwards in various colors. Black cloth slipcase with woodtype letterpress printed, brilliantly colored,full page title label. One in an edition of 25 copies, signed by John Ross. Fine.

Almost all the type is from the collection of the Tipoteca Italiana, with a few fonts from the High Tide Press in New York. In his Introduction, John Ross writes: “Five years ago … [I heard of] a newly forming type museum in a town about one hour north of Venice.

“… Clare Romano, my artist wife, and [I went] to the town of Cornuda, in the province of Treviso, to visit the just organized Tipoteca Italiana, a foundation created for the purpose of collecting and preserving the type and presses used in the letterpress printing industry. …

“The driving force behind this new museum of type and presses is Silvio Antiga, the president of the Foundation and a director of the printing firm of Antiga Grafiche, a thriving, high quality press for posters, fine books, and other commercial and industrial printed material. The unmatched energy and enthusiasm of Silvio Antiga is the prime reason why this new collection of type and presses has developed so rapidly and efficiently into one of the most complete collections in Italy.

“Antiga wrote to over sixty of the most prominent printing firms in Italy to ask if they would send their rarely used type and other equipment to form the core of the growing collection. The response was overwhelming and the new museum was flooded with thousands of fonts of type, scores of presses, type setting machines and other devices that had been outmoded by newer systems.

“Of course, this mass of material needed to be housed, so the Tipoteca bought and reconstructed a deconsecrated church nearby, erected new structures and designed new and efficient spaces to show some of the collected equipment. Several warehouses are storing more presses and type. Each press is repaired to working condition before it is displayed, a job which challenges their dedicated mechanics and technicians.

“I suggested to Antiga that a working printshop could be used to produce artists books, posters or prints to keep the letterpress tradition alive by artists and designers using the equipment collected in the Tipoteca. He agreed and this book is one of the first efforts to produce new work using old technology.”

A tour de force by Ross using old type to form not only text, but brilliantly colored illustrations.

Related items: Artists' Books, Catalogue 36 - Summer 2008, Typography, High Tide Press, John Ross