The Wonders of Hebrew Wood Type
A talk by Shani Avni
RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection is one of the world’s premier libraries on graphic communication history and practices. Our growing library holds over 45,000 volumes and over 130 archival collections. In an effort to expand coverage of global scripts, the Cary acquired a collection of some 40 fonts of Hebrew/Yiddish wood type in 2014. As the Cary focuses on telling the history of printing through original artifacts, this collection has been carefully cleaned and restored in accordance with established archival practices. Now, it is poised to serve its purpose as an accessible historical resource. Various research avenues wait to be explored through this unique collection: the development of immigrant presses in the US and their profound cultural influence on the local population; the story of the Jewish communities and the development of the Yiddish language; the Hebrew script and its transformation into movable type and the many constraints this entailed. Additionally, the various archival challenges such a collection presents are an opportunity to widen the discussion on how to maintain a collection that does not fully comply with conventional Latin alphabet schemas and, in the case of a “living archive” such as the Cary, how to make the type collection not only physically available for printing and research, but also engaging as an educational portal into a foreign script, language, and culture.
