Hot Off the Press: Former Design Faculty David Shields Talks Preserving Wooden Legacy of the RRK

The 150-year-old collection altered visual communications in the 19th century, revitalizes student art-making in the 21st

By Neerul Gupta

Before there was Adobe, there was wood.

In the nineteenth century, wood type boomed alongside the commercial printing industry. Cheaper and lighter than its metal predecessor, wood type eased the printing of large-scale posters to catch the eyes of the masses. The American public went from purchasing books and newspapers to learn news to freely reading it in the streets.

Rob Roy Kelly is the founding scholar of wood type and best known for the Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection (RRK), a 100-piece assemblage of typefaces he gathered from local printers in the late 1950s. The UT Harry Ransom Center attained the RRK in 1966, and it was transferred to the care of the Department of Design in 1993.

In 2004, David Shields, then assistant chair of Design at UT, became its primary caretaker. Up until he left UT in 2012, Shields organized, corrected, and updated information in the collection, most of which was left untouched for 40 years. He discovered the collection housed 160, not 100, typefaces, the oldest one hailing back to 1865.

All good things come full circle. This past Tuesday, Shields returned to the Forty Acres to discuss his 408-page book The Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection: A History and Catalog at the Harry Ransom Center. In his book and research blog, Shields explores Kelly’s history with the collection, the stylistic development of wood type, and the textual history of each typeface.

Shields spent two summers working with UT students to print everything in the collection. And by everything, he doesn’t just mean the typefaces. They printed the feet and sides of the typeface (i.e., the flat wood surface one holds above the type to press onto the bed). He studied the wood grain and its patterns and cataloged the manufacturer for each type to compare and contrast the differences. This meticulous work was the first of its kind.

Despite having studied the 150-year-old collection hundreds of times over the course of almost 20 years, Shields notices something new every time he looks at it. “The collection teaches us to look closely and think persistently,” said Shields. History is the gift that keeps on giving.

Henry Smith, SDCT Fabrication Manager, is currently the Design Custodian of the collection. Continuing Shields’ mission, Smith oversees the collection’s use by students. “These are artifacts, but it’s not useful for them to live in a glass case. We want them to be functional so the history lives on.” Students taking an introductory topography class are taught how to use the collection, after which they are free to use it as they wish.

In the age of technological innovation, it can be hard to imagine what wood type can offer us. But Smith noted that hands-on art has a tangible aspect that on a poetic level is much more significant than pushing buttons on a computer. Digital art, while incredibly efficient and productive, runs the risk of perfection. Indeed, there is beauty in imperfection. Smith uses the example of three large “O” types that, at first glance, were identical. Upon further examination, however, some wood was slightly chipped in one type, and other types had ever so slightly different rounds. “You have to let go of control when working with these types and realize that something weird might happen. It might be great, or it might be terrible. And that’s how innovation happens.”

Both Smith and Shields largely credited the surviving legacy of the RRK to students who spent tedious hours of labor cataloging types in a specimen archive. Now, the collection lives on in student artwork.

Design senior Gabby Rivera uses the collection to venture beyond the digital world. “I have spent a lot of time on the computer, so it’s been really cool to produce things in the physical world.” She recently made a radial gradient with the collection. Gabi Williams, a recent design graduate, uses the collection to create signage and promotional merchandise. Using the RRK, she crafted a bumper sticker for her social media role at the UT student radio station KVRX.

“[RRK typefaces] are tools, and they should be used as tools as a means to propagate and preserve history,” said Shields. Smith and his students keep the physical life of RRK alive via Instagram, just as Shields does.

The RRK resides in the UT Design Lab and awaits further student creation. SDCT is fortunate to house the collection, which will surely inspire designers to appreciate the wooden medium that started it all.