Stencil dies: new tools for an old trade
- Submitting institution
-
The University of Reading
: B - Typography and Graphic Communication
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory : B - Typography and Graphic Communication
- Output identifier
- 38414
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
-
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- Book title
- Vom Buch auf die Strasse: Grosse Schrift im öffenlichen Raum (Journal der HGB #3)
- Publisher
- Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst
- ISBN
- 9783932865862
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This output traces the invention and development of stencil dies in the USA in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Such dies were sold to the general public as tools for cutting stencils; they were portable and thereby offered any enterprising individual a means of canvassing for work in a previously specialist trade. The study begins by looking back at selected European precursors before focusing on the die-making activities of M. J. Metcalf, A. J. Fullam and S. M. Spencer in the north-east states of the USA. Evidence is gathered through the close study of surviving stencil tool ‘outfits’, contemporary catalogues, circulars and newspaper advertisements, and a site visit to Monmouth, Maine, where Metcalf material is preserved.
The research assembles an historical narrative that is wholly new and unreported, which serves to illustrate manufacturing entrepreneurialism, self-reliance and self-fashioning through an ‘access to tools’, and innovation in the design of letterforms suited to stencil work of this kind. The study adds new dimensions to social-economic history in the USA at this time as well as by demonstrating and illustrating radical approaches to letterform design far in advance of equivalent episodes in the early decades of the twentieth century. The study is rigorous in its sourcing, close analysis and interpretation of primary artefacts, documents and other textual sources, and in its presentation and use of visual and physical evidence.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -