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Typo: A Monthly Newspaper and Literary Review, Volume 6
[miscellaneous paragraphs]
The horse-leech again! This time it is the boiler-makers. They demand a prohibitive duty on locomotive and other boilers. Thus does labor play into the hands of the « bloated monopolist. »
The most remarkable and original specimen of typography yet to hand comes to us from Mr B. H. Howig, 100 Louis-st., Grand Rapids, Michigan. It consists of two cards, bound with colored silk ribbons, the upper one containing slits through which is inserted a movable calendar for the year, beautifully printed on satin ribbon, green and gold. The monogram « 92 » is in rule-work embossed. A sketch of the eastern hemisphere, the oceans shown in blue tint, and the circle set off by a background of gold splashes, fills the right-hand corner. The artist is depicted sitting in a careless attitude on the Isthmus of Panama, and beneath is the motto, « I am still on earth. » The card is shaped and folded at foot, and a New-Year greeting occupies the fold. Sheet 2 is embossed also, and at foot is a dreadful yellow brass-rule dragon with red eyes and green outlines. A photo-engraving of the artist, making his appearance through a screen, has beneath it, « What! Never saw me before? » Turning the card, we have a rear view of the same gentleman, with the words, « Perhaps you have seen me —! » From two pages of humorous text attached to the same card we gather that Mr Howig is in charge of the job department of the Tradesman Company, Grand Rapids. In a separate slip we are told that with the exception of executing the photo-engravings, the artist performed the whole work, including the rule-bending, embossing, and die-cutting, after working hours. No curving instrument was used in the rule-work, which is excellent, and the embossing and cutting were by methods devised by himself. The issue was limited to five hundred copies, and only a practical printer can realize the amount of work involved, and the excellence of finish characterising the whole. The Craft, unless we are greatly mistaken, will hear more of Mr Howig in days to come.
The Preston Guardian thinks that the exalted opinion the Nineteenth Century has of itself will not be endorsed by the Twentieth. Even now, the earlier part of the century is regarded with a kind of mild contempt. « The nineteenth century, when it was young, did not recognize the genius of Shelley or Keats, but it bought twenty editions of 'Satan' Montgomery's poems. »
Among the curiosities of Paris (says the Echo) is a Roumanian gentleman, M. Sofer, who calls himself an artiste micrographe, whose specialty is that he can write with the naked eye perfectly-formed letters on a scale so small that others can only decipher them with a strong magnifying-glass. He has drawn a portrait of M. Carnot about the size of a cabinet photograph, every stroke of which so examined proves to be a letter, the whole comprising a history of the President in 62,000 letters. A portrait of Leo XIII on the same scale contains the whole of his encyclicals concealed in his hair, and among other curiosities of the same kind are grains of wheat with entire sonnets of Victor Hugo inscribed upon them. It is a perverse kind of ingenuity which does these things, but if M. Sofer really works with the naked eye, he is at least a person of interest to scientists and oculists.