By David Shields
408 pages, hardcover, $65
Published by University of Texas Press
utpress.utexas.edu

Wood type is bold and beautiful, and a hefty book like this one (don’t drop it on your toe!) seems fitting. It offers a wealth of information about the specimens in the Rob Roy American Wood Type Collection at the University of Texas (UT) in Austin, Texas, their classifications and the manufacturers who created them while also telling a finely detailed history of Kelly’s journey acquiring wood type, designing and printing specimens, and researching their histories. Born in Nebraska, Kelly served in the Pacific during WWII, attended college on the G.I. Bill and got his MFA at Yale’s fledgling graduate program, where he studied under greats like Josef Albers, Lester Beall, Alvin Lustig and Herbert Matter. Not only did he amass this significant collection of wood type (and companion specimen booklets and sheets), but he created the first US undergraduate graphic design program at the Minneapolis School of Art in 1957. The book positions the collection within the network of relationships Kelly formed rather than a story of a sole collector: librarians, dealers, historians and fellow collectors. Author David Shields, the custodian of the collection while head of the design program at UT, augments Kelly’s own scholarship with more than 300 glorious specimen pages. It’s easy to fall in love with, for example, the sensuous curves of the Tuscan designs or the leafy Florentine ornaments. Beautifully printed, the book comes with a brilliant green-ribbon bookmark and vibrant red/orange endsheets in a pattern drawn from the collection’s borders and rules. —Angelynn Grant