"Schaefer (Single Can)"

"Pabst Blue Ribbon"

"Schaefer"

"Old Milwaukee"

"Rolling Rock"

"Miller"

"Budweiser"

"Coors"

"Busch"

"Narragansett"

"Mixed Beer Composition 1"

"Mixed Beer Composition 2"

This font of large, hand-carved wood type from the 1840s was purchased from the Museum of Printing in North Andover, Massachusetts. This is the oldest type in the Lead Graffiti collection.

This galley of lowercase 96-point Caslon includes some wonderful multi-letter ligatures. The galley shown measures about 12" x 14" and weighs in at 44 pounds.

This is a full California Job Case of foundry metal 24-point Garamond. Just about filled to the max, the case weighs 86 pounds. Lead Graffiti has approximately 1,400 pounds of Garamond in the full run of 8 through 72 point.

When you clean out an old print shop, you often adopt galleys of 'standing type' (not distributed letter-by-letter back into the California Job Cases after the job was printed). A wonderful patina of dust and spiderwebs testifies to decades of non-use.

Every letterpress shop keeps a 'hell box' as a place to throw worn or damaged type to keep it out of circulation. This represents a double handful of mostly 8- and 10-point metal foundry type.

A typographic landscape composed of wood and metal type alphabets is evidence of the physicality of typography printed via letterpress.

To preserve standing type along with typefaces without a job case, sets are often tied up with twine and stored on galleys for future use.

This carefully stacked pile of 96-point foundry metal, Caslon, is the largest metal type in the Lead Graffiti collection. Originally cut by Britain's William Caslon in the mid-1700s, Caslon is often referred to as "the oldest living typeface."

A stack of 50-line (50 picas, or 8.33" high) numbers of a sans serif wood typeface.

The Linotype was the industry standard for "hot metal" type for newspapers, magazines, and posters from the late 1880s to the 1960s. This galley of brass Linotype matrices (each the mould of an individual character) was saved from the scrapyard by the .918 Club, a group of Letterpress printers in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and donated to Lead Graffiti to keep them in use.

A still life of a variety of the elegantly shaped ampersand. Just below the middle on the left side is a hand-carved, shadow version of our favorite piece of type in the Lead Graffiti collection. Just under it is brand-new Clarendon Outline made especially for our "Tour de Lead Graffiti Project," which translates events of each stage of the 2011 Tour de France into typographic posters.

This sort (a single-cast metal character) of 96-point Caslon is made from an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony. In contrast to sissy digital typefaces, you can hear and feel letterforms like these hit the paper.

This image and below: Two Handy Boxes manufactured by the Baltimore Type Foundry Company, which started in the late 1700s. These offered, among other items, a variety of geometric shapes, Greek, brackets, em dashes, math symbols, fractions, and, of course, stars, used in combination with typefaces.

A side-view portrait of our 3,400-pound 1956 Intertype C4 line-casting machine, one of the most remarkable machines you will ever see in operation. Patented in the 1880s, these machines offered a speed that began an information explosion allowing newspapers to move from four- or eight-page handset type weeklies to dailies.

Ray Nichols, former professor and longtime director of the Visual Communications Group at the University of Delaware, is part of the glue that binds his wife, Jill Cypher, and son, Tray Nichols, into their letterpress studio, Lead Graffiti. Located in Newark, Delaware, the studio produces a variety of exceptional personal (recently "Tour de Lead Graffiti") and client work. They design and print for preeminent organizations such as the Metropolitan Opera, Delaware Art Museum, and the Art Directors Club. In order to satisfy his ongoing passion for teaching, Ray runs a variety of letterpress and bookmaking workshops for designers, writers, and students at the Lead Graffiti studio. For Ray, Lead Graffiti provides a slowed-down, satisfying life of hands-on work, while functioning as a venue to preserve a traditional craft in a world saturated by digital processes.

Toothpick Cactus

Golden Barrel

Curiosity Plant

Melon Cactus

Agave Mexicana

Thimble Cactus

Night Blooming Cactus

Artichoke Agave

Golden Star Cactus

Crested Easter Lily Cactus

African Candelabra

Backs.

Faces.