To whet your appetite a little, here’s a lovely photo of our 8 line Futura Medium.
More progress photos over here.

Also, kudos to our good friends Keegan Meegan in PDX who are also enjoying a new studio too! Can’t wait to visit the new shop!

We’re pushing hard to open in a month. Are you excited yet? We are!

We spent all day trying to put things in their place.

16 W. North Ave. Baltimore MD.

We love wood type. Wood type is awesome, and I’m very pleased to note that we have a fair amount headed for the BPS studios (probably about 1 cabinet’s-worth, though it’s hard to guage when they’re all in paper-boxes, stored in an apartment). A LOT of it is a generic Futura knockoff, in a number of sizes (6, 8, 12, 18, and 25 line) and weights (standard and condensed widths) and some miscellaneous other fonts (Brush Script, Cooper Black, and Murray Hill, in various sizes), some unknown serifed font in 12 line (maybe?), and some mixed gothics of in various sizes and incomplete-ness.

We also have some gorgeous border material, and a wicked collection of numbers in 30, 60, and 120 line size (that’s 5 – 20 inches tall), and a nice set of calendar blocks.

But, as much as we love wood type, there are some people out there who might just love it more.

Nick Sherman is an outspoken typophile who runs woodtyper.com. While his day job involves digital font management, his real passion seems to be traveling the country and visiting incredible wood type collections around the country.

Woodtyper.com showcases a lot of things, all typography related, and is an incredible source of interviews and in-depth looks at other people’s wood-type and typography-related projects. For even more drool-worthy wood type goodness, check out his flickr stream (also a winning source of manhole cover and pizza photos).

End-Grain.com is the pet-project of Bethany Heck, who is still in school (studying design of course!).

Named after the cut of wood typically used for making wood type, end-grain.com is a lot of things at once, including a source of interviews and studio profiles, an aggregate of flickr and twitter feeds, and a showcase of her personal collection. She was even interviewed by Nick Sherman about the site.

I have to say, what I find most fascinating is her dedication to reviving incomplete and rare fonts using modern technology. Besides, we all know that pantograph routers would have been replaced by laser-cutters if they’d had the technology at the time…

Oh, and should I also make note of the fact that her collection is VERY enviable..? because it is! Kudos Bethany, keep up the amazing work.

Then we take it back to the beginning of wood type adoration. Rob Roy Kelly literally wrote the book on wood type. One of our more coveted books here at BPS is this one:
It is very out of print right now, and being offered up on Amazon, used, for a cool thousand (and that’s the paperback version). Dang. Luckily for us common folk, the Rob Roy Kelly collection, which is housed at the University of Texas, Austin, is all available online. It’s a pretty vast site, so pour another cup of coffee and tuck in.

In short, wood type is pretty hot right now. The Hamilton Type Museum is finally functioning again, and the subject of a documentary called Typeface.

What is the likelihood that you, the BPS customer, will want to print with wood type? Maybe 50-50, if we’re lucky.

What’s the likelihood that we’ll keep collecting? 100%!

I’m sure you think we’ve forgotten about you, or given up on this whole crazy idea, but NO – we’ve just been a little busy.

The studio space hunt is still underway. We’ve looked at a few but nothing is quite right yet. However, it occurred to us that we don’t really know you yet. We know you’re visiting the site, we know you’ve signed up for the mailing list, but who are you? What do you want from us?

To that end, we’ve created a survey for you – and we tried to include everything, even the stuff we don’t think you’re interested in (because we’ve been wrong about a lot of things before), and right now anything is possible so why not aim really really high!

In all reality, we just want to know a little more about you. After the jump is a handful of questions for you. Please take a minute and answer them for us. You have no idea how helpful it will be.

Also, if you’re not on the mailing list yet, please sign up! (I’d hotlink it, but it’s right there, on the right, just sign up there!)

Click through for the survey >>>

Of course, if Scrooge McDuck was our uncle this would be a lot less daunting. A lot of spaces are available in the city right now, but all are out of our price range. This is a problem. We know anywhere we will be moving into will require no less than 3 months setup, painting, new walls, electrical, plumbing, and easily a couple thousand in expenses we don’t know we don’t know.

In short, the more people that know about this, the better. We KNOW the right space is out there. We really like the North Avenue, Station North Arts area, but we’ll consider anything reasonable. We’re looking for a couple thousand square feet, something with 1st floor access or a wicked awesome freight elevator. E-mail us here if you have any good ideas for us. Thanks!