Project description
I need a full alphabet in two sizes: a large one for a headline of two or three lines, and a small one for the caption at the foot of the card. With them the figures nought to nine and the ordinary punctuation — full stop, comma, dash, hyphen, exclamation and question marks, quotes and brackets. The letters that come up most often have to be supplied in several copies each; one e or one o per line is never enough to set a real sentence. The drawing of the letters should be your own or taken from a source under a free licence — please do not offer me a commercial typeface cut into wood, I do not want an argument about rights afterwards. Everything is cut mirrored so the impression reads the right way round.
The critical point is height. Every piece must stand at exactly the same height: a discrepancy of a fraction of a millimetre already leaves gaps in the impression, and no amount of packing behind the sheet will fix it. The wood must be hard end grain, otherwise the face crushes after a dozen passes and the fine strokes spread. My ink is water based — I do not use solvents in a living room and I never will — so the type gets washed with water and a soft brush, and the wood has to take that without swelling or splitting.
What I am asking for:
— a full alphabet in two sizes, figures and punctuation, with the common letters in several copies each;
— mirrored cutting and one uniform height across the whole set, measured piece by piece rather than sampled;
— a small bevel along the edge of the face so ink cannot pack into the corners and leave a dark rim around the letter;
— spaces and quads in several widths, plus rules for word gaps and blank lines;
— a composing case with boxes sized by letter frequency and a label on every box;
— a composing stick sized to my card and a chase with quoins so the forme holds tight during the run;
— proofs pulled on my own paper and shown to me before the work is handed over;
— a short note on cleaning, drying and storing the set between runs.
Timescale about a fortnight; the budget in the listing is a guide and I am happy to discuss it once we agree on how many pieces the set contains.