Letters are beautiful. From specimens of chromatic woodtype to the groovy letter people and 16th Century writing templates typography and calligraphy turn visual language into something beautiful. Beginning in the early 20th Century, the Ludlow Typograph Company (1906 to late 1980s) gave its sales staff specimen books to advertise fonts and ornaments that could be printed on its Ludlow Typograph, a hot metal typesetting system used in letterpress printing for large-type material such as newspaper headlines or posters.
Produced in four editions (A, B, C and D) as “Some Ludlow Typefaces”, these pages are from issue ‘D’, most likely published between 1940 and 1958.
These pages of tight design are a form of visual data, in which the everyday is presented in an innovative and engaging way. Good typography ensures that the all the complexities and contractions of human thought and expression are not replaced by the conformity of the industrial machine.
Founded by the machine’s inventor Washington Irving Ludlow, Ludlow typefaces were proprietary. The principal typographer at Ludlow was R. Hunter Middleton, creator of several notable font designs, including Coronet, Stencil, Delphian Open Title, Eusebius, Flair, Radiant, Record Gothic, Stellar, Tempo, Umbra and many others. Other noted designers for Ludlow included Robert Wiebking, Douglas Crawford McMurtrie who served as director of advertising and typography before Middleton, and Hermann Zapf, whose Optima and Palatino were among the last faces cut for Ludlow. These designs and others appear in the book, along with examples of how they could be used.
Despite the rapid decline of letterpress printing in the 1960s, Ludlow continued in operation at least through the mid-1980s, because Ludlow matrices can also be used by rubber stamp manufacturers. In the early 1980s, the company claimed that 16,000 Ludlows were in operation throughout the world.
Here’s a video of the Ludlow in Operation:
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