Way up in the hills of Prescott, a small cadre of diehards is keeping analog type alive. In a culture that worships efficiency, Sky Shipley is a proud member of the resistance.
The Analogs is a production of KJZZ’s The Show in Phoenix, Arizona. This episode was produced, written and edited by Sam Dingman, with additional production by Amber Victoria Singer. The cover art is by Claire Lawton. The Show’s executive producer is Amy Silverman. Special thanks to Sky Shipley, Jared, and John Risseeuw.
Transcript
Sam Dingman From KJZZ’s The Show, this is The Analogs — stories about people who make things by hand, and what those things tell us about those people. This is Episode 3: We Are What We Fight For.
[ANALOGS THEME MUSIC PLAYS]
Sam Dingman On a warm Tuesday last May, I drove up to Prescott, and parked my car outside a small compound of low-slung buildings on top of a hill. It was early afternoon, and there was mist drifting through the valley below. Above the door of one of the buildings was a sign. It said: “Chapel.”
Sky Shipley Ah yes. Like everything else, therein lies a tale.
Sam Dingman This is Sky Shipley, the owner of the Skyline Type Foundry.
Sky Shipley I got to referring to this building as “The Chapel” because typefounding is practically a religion for us. … It’s the perfect name for this place. It’s mysterious, it’s true, and it’s memorable.
Sam Dingman In the world of printing and letterpress, Sky Shipley is something of a folk hero.
Sky Shipley There is no other place on earth that you can get the type that we are creating here.
Sam Dingman Most of us think of typefaces as the shape of words on a page. You open Microsoft Word, or Google Docs, you pick one from a drop-down menu, and you start typing. I wrote the script for this story in Times New Roman — a typeface that almost anyone who’s ever typed a document would probably recognize. But once upon a time, each Times New Roman letter in this script would have physically existed. And the journey of those letters to this page would have started at a place like Skyline Type Foundry.
To print with Times New Roman letters, you would’ve first needed a Times New Roman matrix. You can think of the matrix sort of like a bread mold — or maybe a collection of small molds, each of them in the shape of a single character. At the Chapel, Sky Shipley has one of the original Times New Roman matrices, which he uses to make Times New Roman type. The type comes in a little box. When you open it, you find rows of tiny hunks of metal — little loaves of letterbread. Each metal loaf is etched with a single character in the Times New Roman style. Each of those tiny etched characters has been cast — or baked, to overwork this metaphor — using a 1930s typecasting machine.
All of which is to say: There was a time when a font was not a casual choice. And Sky Shipley has dedicated his life to honoring that time.
Sky Shipley Oh Sam — there is a big big difference between setting something you wrote, one letter at a time, by hand — big difference between that and thumb-typing on a smartphone. I don’t have a smartphone. … I don’t do anything with portable electronic devices. I’ll have none of that. I belong in 1925, and I’m gonna go to the grave that way.
Sam Dingman For decades now, Sky Shipley has been collecting typeface matrices from all over the world — he showed me one he’d recently rescued from an old foundry in India. He has hundreds of these matrices — some more than a century old. When he finds them, he brings them here, to the Chapel, where they’re cast by one of Sky’s employees — a guy named Jared.
Jared I find a lot of satisfaction here, because it’s something that not everyone has done in their life. And I think — don’t quote me on this, even though I am being recorded, but I think I am the last person in, at least America, who has the job position of typecaster. ‘Cause we’re the last full-time type foundry.
Sam Dingman To be clear: While Skyline carries common typefaces like Times New Roman, they also cast incredibly rare ones.
Jared So this is Collier, right here. It was a specific design for a specific magazine.
Sam Dingman That magazine, by the way, was called Collier’s. It was published from 1888 to 1957.
Jared And there was only one set of those matrixes cut — because some fonts, the really popular ones, have had multiple matrixes cut, so they can be made by many. But there was only one set of these matrixes cut, and so we were able to get the one, and we’re able to now give that type to anybody who wants it, kinda thing.
Sam Dingman Jared is the guy who operates that machine from the 1930s I mentioned earlier. There are four of these machines at the Foundry. They look sort of like a cross between a woodstove and an oil rig. To cast a piece of type — say a letter “H” — Jared fills a basin with molten liquid — an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony. He fires up a primitive motor, and feeds the “H” mold into a pumping, wheezing forest of cranks, wheels, levers, and hoses. The alloy hardens and gets pressed into the form of an “H,” and then a tiny metal plate, with an H on it, shoots out the other side of the machine.
Jared Good here — just gonna check that off, check that off, gotta do this one more time.
Sam Dingman Sky told me that most font boxes come with four capital H’s. So if Jared’s doing a run of 150 boxes of a particular typeface, he has to cast 600 H’s — which, of course, is just one character. An average typeface contains 72 characters. Jared says each font takes him about a week to cast.
Jared It’s a little bit of a complex process, but Sky got it all figured out, so everything is seamless. And that’s the cool part, is that it works.
[LAUGHS]
Sam Dingman A moment later, Jared corrected himself. The process isn’t totally seamless, but that’s not really Skyline’s fault. Those four casting machines that they use are the last of their kind. If they break, which they sometimes do, the only person who knows how to fix them is Sky. But there’s only so much he can do, because nobody’s making parts for them anymore.
Jared Every time we lose one of those parts, it’s gone for good, basically. … Another reason why I have to pay very, very, very close attention to what I’m doing, and make sure that I’m not making a mistake in any meaningful way.
Sam Dingman Sky’s collection of typeface matrices is also the only one of its kind. And many of the typefaces in Sky’s collection are the only known copies. If they get lost or damaged, that typeface goes extinct.
It’s a responsibility that Sky takes seriously. He’s not a young man — he opened the Foundry back in 2011, when he retired after twenty-seven years as a pilot. But he’s working even harder now than he did then. The day we met, he’d just gotten back from California. A family there had called to say their grandfather had an old press and some typefaces. Sky made three trips there and back to haul everything up to the Chapel. He and Jared start work every day at 6 a.m. — they add two-to-three new typefaces to their catalog every month.
When Sky told me that casting type means working with lead, I asked if that ever makes him nervous. He said he doesn’t worry about it — that they don’t heat the alloy hot enough to toxify the lead, and either way, they work in a shop with plenty of ventilation. He told me people — like me — ask him about this a lot. And when they do, he has a joke he likes to tell.
Sky Shipley Have you ever heard of the occupational disease associated with printing and typefounding? Not counting alcoholism, I mean? And they say, well, no. And I say that’s because there is none! There is no occupational hazard from working with lead, if you don’t eat it!
Sam Dingman Even if it’s just the typefaces that are in danger, the question of life and death feels relevant, given the nature of Sky’s work.
Sky Shipley I wonder if anyone will take the torch and go with it after I have to step out. Probably not. I don’t think it will survive me. … It would be a life commitment — change your life for sure, to take on this business. It would be your life.
Sam Dingman For the moment, though, there’s not really time to think about stuff like that. Sky and Jared have too much work to do. And towards the end of my visit, I wanted to make sure they knew I appreciated them letting me distract them with my questions.
Sam Dingman Jared, can I — what’s your last name?
Jared Uh, I don’t — why do you need that? Sorry.
Sam Dingman Just so I could properly identify you in the story. You don’t have to share if you don’t want to.
Jared Well, I just, uh … I prefer the concept of: I am playing a vital part in a five hundred year old craft. And I am keeping something alive which is supposed to stay alive in my opinion. And so, it’s not really — don’t shout it from the rooftops, kinda thing.
Sam Dingman Jared’s words had a kind of mystical ring to them — which was fitting, given the existential energies that seem to linger in the air around the chapel. Then again, maybe that was just the mist drifting up from the valley. Maybe not. Maybe that uncertainty is ultimately what matters.
Sam Dingman One of the other things I was interested in is on your website you say one of the things you’re committed to is the mystery — what’s the appeal of the mystery?
Sky Shipley Well, we’ve got a bunch of liquid metal here. We’ve got a brass matrix and a machine. Combine all those three and we get type. To me, that’s a mystery. It’s mechanically explainable, but it’s still a mystery.
Sam Dingman As I was packing up to leave Skyline Type Foundry, Jared stopped by Sky’s office to chat about their schedule for the next day. When they were finished, Jared turned to me. He handed me a small rectangle of cardstock.
Jared And for you, Sam, this is a piece of letterpress art I made, which would be a nice little souvenir for you.
Sam Dingman Printed on the card, in one of the Foundry’s typefaces, was a phrase: We are what we fight for.
Jared That’s a quote that I heard once, and thought very deeply about it for a long time … That’s a cool part of letterpress art is that it’s both a message, and a beauty.
Sam Dingman The Analogs is a production of The Show, on KJZZ 91.5, in Phoenix, Arizona. This episode was produced, written and edited by me, Sam Dingman, with additional production by Amber Victoria Singer. The Show’s executive producer is Amy Silverman. Special thanks to Sky Shipley, Jared, and John Risseeuw — and to you, for listening.
Next time, we’ll head to Flagstaff, where a guitar-maker named Ryan spends hours and hours tapping on wood planks.
Ryan Elewaut This is a piece of sitka spruce, and if you hold one of these plates in the right spot you can tap it and get some different tones.
[RYAN TAPS ON THE WOOD]
And if we do that with a different species you’ll get a totally different sound. This is cedar.
[MORE TAPPING]
And we could do — here’s some Ponderosa.
[MORE TAPPING]
And then this is Adirondack spruce — also red spruce. Like the old, classic Martins are Adirondack spruce.
[MORE TAPPING]
Sam Dingman Wow!
That’s next time on The Analogs
