The Show's ANALOGS series is about people who make things by hand — and what those things tell us about those people.
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."
"Ah yes. Like everything else, therein lies a tale," Sky Shipley said, the owner of the Skyline Type Foundry.
"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," Shipley said.
In the world of printing and letterpress, Sky Shipley is something of a folk hero.
"There is no other place on earth that you can get the type that we are creating here," he said.
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 1930’s 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.
"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," Shipley said.
For decades now, 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.
"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," Jared said.
To be clear: while Skyline carries common typefaces like Times New Roman, they also cast incredibly rare ones.
"So this is Collier, right here. And it was a specific design for a specific magazine," Jared said.
That magazine, by the way, was called Collier's. It was published from 1888 to 1957.
"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," Jared said.
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.
"Good here — just gonna check that off, check that off, gotta do this one more time," Jared said.
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 six-hundred 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.
"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," Jared said.
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.
"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," Jared said.
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 27 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 catalogue 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.
"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!" Shipley said.
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.
"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," Shipley said.
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.
"Jared, can I — what’s your last name?" I asked.
"Uh … I don't … why do you need that? Sorry," Jared said.
"Just so I could properly identify you in the story. You don’t have to share if you don’t want to," I said.
"Well, I just, um — I prefer the concept of: I am playing a vital part in a 500-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," Jared said.
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.
Or maybe not. Maybe that uncertainty is ultimately what matters.
"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 of this process. What's the appeal of the mystery?" I asked.
"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," Shipley said.
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.
"And for you, Sam, this is a piece of letterpress art I made, which would be a nice little souvenir for you," Jared said.
Printed on the card, in one of the Foundry’s typefaces, was a phrase: "We are what we fight for."
"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," Jared said.
REPORTER'S NOTE: Special thanks this week to John Risseeuw.
