Notwithstanding our solemn promise to give more attention to restocking the soldouts and less to new castings, we have three new products to introduce this month. First and foremost: to launch this auspicious new year in style, here’s Collection No. 50, our starry salute to Chicago’s Jennifer Farrell and her Starshaped Press! Jen is renowned for the letterpress artistry she creates with metal type. In addition to being a longtime Skyline customer, she continually offers inspiration and challenge to the entire letterpress community, and to us here at the type foundry—all on the STF crew are competent letterpress printers, with combined experience of over 63 years, and together we own some 28 presses (11 of which are in the Skyline pressroom) and several thousand fonts of type. Thus our 50th (Collection, that is) is presented in celebration of the 20th (anniversary, that is) of Starshaped Press, founded 1999. Congratulations, Jen!
In October we announced a major special commission to cast Weiss Roman in 18 point for a noted fine printer in Great Britain. That project is now complete; full fonts and lowercase supplements are in stock and available for purchase.
Continuing with decorative material cast from the matrices rescued from India, our third new item for January is Border No. U-19 in 12 point. This tidy little two-element Border is beautiful in its simplicity. (Caution, if you gaze at it too long you’ll develop an unaccountable thirst for Diet Pepsi.)
Some 20 new-old fonts were listed to The Junk Bin in December and sometimes they sell within a day. By the way, we finally got the Sort By feature straightened out and now you can view the latest additions first. Looking back on 2018, it was a record year by far at Skyline. Numerous projects are underway and in the queue for 2019, including, this month, our eighth staging of Thompson Tech, an intensive week-long training seminar in the operation, maintenance and repair of Thompson Type Casters. And yes, we did do a restock casting—Collection No. 5, the Dwiggins Abstract Florets, is back on the shelf. Thanks for your business and Happy New Year.