Hebrew Wood Type at the Cary Collection - Shani Avni
Channel: GRANSHAN Conference
Date: 05/10/2022

The Cary Graphic Arts Collection at RIT is one of the world’s premier libraries on graphic communication history and practices. In an effort to expand coverage of global scripts, the Cary acquired a collection of some 40 fonts of Hebrew/Yiddish wood type in 2014. As the Cary focuses on telling the history of printing through original artifacts, this collection has been carefully cleaned and restored in accordance with established archival practices. Now, it serves its purpose as an accessible historical resource. Various research avenues are explored through this unique collection: the development of immigrant presses in the US and their profound cultural influence on the local population; the story of the Jewish communities and the development of the Yiddish language; the Hebrew script and its transformation into movable type and the many constraints this entailed. This talk will focus on how in-depth hands-on research on this printing realia collection informs contemporary Hebrew type design practice.