Does it seem smooth and effortless for Skyline to proffer a new type face or decorative border every month? We do try to create that illusion, but in reality each project takes many days of tedious work (with endless opportunity for error). Our 750-mile trip to the Bay Area Printers Fair last weekend left us scrambling to finish the casting of our new type face for May and get the labels and specimen cards printed. But we dood it! Designed in 1928 for Ludlow by R. Hunter Middleton, here for your printing and collecting pleasure is the elegant Delphian Open Title in 36 point.
Restocked and once again available: Bernhard Fashion 24pt, Borders No. 1259 and F-850, Quads & Spacing in 18 & 24.
Our Dutch Auction page was established several years ago especially to sell the more rare and valuable used type fonts, allowing the demand to establish fair market value. Items are posted at a fixed price, Buy-It-Now—and that price is cut 4% every week until someone snarfs it up. This has been very successful—everything sells, sooner or later! But meanwhile the utility faces and everyday used type (posted on another page of The Junk Bin) has languished unsold. In April we consolidated all that into the Dutch Auction, so it too will drop in price every week until sold. There are currently 31 listings on DA; more type is added whenever I can get it prepped and photographed. Some wood type is in the pipeline.
Other than the BAPF, our one treasure hunt in April yielded two Hammond Glider saws and a thousand pounds of scrap Chinese type.
Skyline does a lot of packing & shipping, and we are rather pleased with ourselves in that we use nothing but repurposed materials as dunnage. (Probably the most odd thing was a quantity of reject foam bra cups that had arrived here as padding in a shipment from China.) Now in the smoking wreckage of last year’s election we are well-supplied with political signs made of Coroplast (the trademark for that corrugated plastic stuff). No, I am not politically active! (may the gods forfend)—the source is a friend, who is. This material that blighted our landscape for months on end is at last serving a useful purpose reinforcing Skyline shipping box floors. Maybe politics is good for something after all.