Design Division launches website for the Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection

New site provides historical overview to students, historians, designers, and collectors

The launch of this website represents a substantial updating of the historical information gathered by Rob Roy Kelly in the 40 years since the first publishing of his seminal text American Wood Types: 1828-1900. The site provides a detailed overview of the wood type Kelly collected while researching vernacular printing in America, and also provides a broad contextual overview of the American wood type manufacturing industry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The website is intended as an expansion of both the quality and quantity of historical information about wood type designs. All types in the collection, twenty-five percent previously unpublished by Kelly, are shown as specimen pages with detailed, updated, and cross-referenced information about each typeface. Two industry-wide timelines, one summarizing the history of American wood type manufacturers, the other an exhaustive listing of known wood type specimen catalogs, are included. The manufacturers timeline is available in an interactive format, and both sets of information are available as printable, high'resolution documents. Both of these timelines add substantially to Kelly's pioneering work of the 1960s.

In a departure from conventional historical research, the newly compiled information is published online to make it freely available for historians, designers and collectors. This open access will help other scholars to add to the available history of this period and these types. David Shields, an Assistant Professor of Design at The University of Texas at Austin, has been engaged in the physical research of the collection for the past four years, organizing and clarifying the historical importance of these types while expanding the information available on the often-elusive histories of these designs. For media inquiries regarding the Kelly Collection, please contact David Shields at dawash@mail.utexas.edu.

The Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection is held by the Design Division of the Department of Art & Art History as a study collection for students. The collection remains vital as it continues to serve as the starting point for rigorous research and to function as a study tool that necessitates physical engagement. The type as museum pieces are saved though continued conscientious use. Preserving our typographic heritage guarantees that the types themselves “will continue to provide historical information that can be discovered in no other way.”