At the beginning of November, Karen and I went to the tenth annual Hamilton Wood Type Museum Wayzgoose, November 2, 3 and 4 in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. If you are not familiar with the term wayzgoose, it is an old word referring to an entertainment given by a master printer to his workmen each year on or about St Bartholomew's Day (24 August). It marked the traditional end of summer and the start of the season of working by candlelight. These days it is any large celebratory gathering of letterpress printers.
I am not particularly interested in letterpress printing and don't use letterpresses, but I am interested in the technology and history of printing. Hamilton was the largest manufacturer of wood type and wood type cases and furniture. The museum is a pretty amazing place. This is a pantograph that is used to make wood type:
And an example of the wood type produced by the pantograph from type high wood that is manufactured at the Hamilton Wood Type Museum. There were a number of worshops and lectures there over those three days.
Here Karen is pulling a print with a new digitally designed wood typeface that was made for the occasion by Mark Simonson. The enfant-terrible from Switzerland, Dafi Kühne, gave workshops and demonstrations that were very entertaining.
We stayed at a very pleasant inn across from the Hamilton museum warehouse called the Lighthouse Inn and we had a wonderful view out our hotel window of beautiful Lake Michigan, with a small beach and waves.
An alarming aspect of our visit to upstate Wisconsin was seeing so many pro-Trump signs and billboards.
Wisconsin has a large number of under-employed whites who are the core supporters of Trump. There are many industries that have suffered a great deal in the past 30 years and this part of Wisconsin has many large abandoned industrial buildings.
On the way back to the Milwaukee airport to catch our flight back home, we stopped at the Kohler Museum. It's a great little museum on the grounds of the bathroom fixture factory grounds, and one of the big attractions are the restrooms. Artists were hired to make special tiles for each of the restrooms and people are encouraged to go into their opposite sex bathrooms to see the wall tiles and fixtures.
Although I enjoyed the trip and the visit to the Hamilton Wooden Type Museum, I don't think that I would go again. Once was perfect.
