The title ‘All Sorts’ is a pun, relying on letterpress printing terminology: an individual letter in lead or wood is called a ‘sort’. Whilst these are usually used to build up words, the designer uses them here to build up his people, All Sorts. The letters and characters used to create each person were chosen specifically for their features in order to convey a variety of facial expressions, body language or emotions, to successfully build up a personality for the figure.

The book uses a simple colour palette — black, with red to highlight details — and is printed on Somerset Book 175gsm and Cairn Natural dark Grey 270gsm in an edition of 100 hand numbered copies. All Sorts was printed by hand on a 40 year old Korrex proofing press at The Print Project and bound by hand by Roger Grech of Papercut Bindery.

All Sorts can be found in the collections of:
The Tate and London Centre for Book Arts.

A deluxe version is planned for some point in the future.
The regular edition can be purchased here for £7.00 +p&p

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Morgan Press Wood Type Specimen book | Wood 2

Sample spreads from Wood 2.
by Morgan Press printers and typographers

Black ink printed on various colored paper stocks

Design: John Alcorn

Author: Morgan Press

Published: Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: Morgan Press, [1964?]

I fell in love with these wood type images awhile back and decided to track them down to share through ‘Typetoken’.

Thanks to Kindra Murphy for the original photos/info

- Kindra’s Blog | Flickr are well worth a visit