Type In The Mid-Century USA

“Archival recovery: it’s journalism, but with dead people” 😵☠️🪦🗃️

Elizabeth Colwell (1881–1961) was the only woman listed as an American designer by American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) in 1948. A working artist in Chicago, she was a printmaker, painter, and writer, plus designed Colwell Handletter and Colwell Handletter Italics for American Type Founders in 1916.

Colwell wrote about hand lettering ✍️ for Sketch Book (1904). Her work also appeared The Printing Art (1905) and Inland Printer’s Lettering for Printers & Designers (1906). W.A. Dwiggins commissioned her for issues of Happyland (1914). Colwell was the first woman featured in a profile series focused on designers and illustrators by The Graphic Arts (March 1913), which includes examples of her fine arts and advertising work. She worked for the WPA’s Federal Art Project (1937) and showed at a related Art Institute of Chicago exhibition. The Library of Congress mounted an exhibition of her work in 1945. Then she dropped off the map.

Lauren found out that Colwell did not die in 1954—she just moved out of Chicago, and died in 1961. Besides Lauren’s insights into Colwell’s art, we discuss archival rabbit holes, some favorite capital letters, and exceptionalism narratives.

Special guest: Lauren Elle DeGaine, policy analyst, craft enthusiast, writer of the very comprehensive "A Woman’s Type: Early Women Type Designers in 20th-Century Book History" (MA thesis, University of Victoria (B.C.), 2021), chronically offline

PSA: Patriarchy hurts us all

📚 by Colwell

• “Notes on Hand-Lettering,” Sketch Book (4 parts; Sept–Dec 1904)
• Songs of Tristram & Ysevlt (1907)
• Songs & Sonnets (1909)
• Colwell Handletter: Luc Devroye, Fonts in Use
• See also: AIGA’s ”American Type Designers and Their Work” exhibition (1947); Alex Jay, "Creator: Elizabeth Colwell," Tenth Letter of the Alphabet (2016); Lauren’s thesis pgs 10–25

Transcript

Re(un)Covered Podcast

Season 1, Episode 4: Type in the mid-century USA

Release date: 12 November 2025

Copyright © 2025. All rights reserved. This text may not be published online or distributed without written permission. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

[intro music] 

Joe: This is ReUnCovered, the podcast about what lingers in the archive and why it matters. Episode four: Type in the mid-century USA.

Recorded voice: The linotype machine sets solid lines of type called hot type, creating that powerful element of communication: the printed word.

Joe: Here we are. Here we are.

Bethany: With episode four.

Joe: We have arrived. It is here. You've asked. We listened. It's here.

Bethany: Today we're talking about basically the only American woman type designer in the first half of the 20th century.

Joe: Wow.

Bethany: Who? Not only, as is another theme of this season, not only was she a typeface designer, she also was a printmaker, a painter, and a writer. She did a lot of really cool work, and she designed Cowell Hand Letter and Cowell Hand Letter italics for American Type Founders in 1916.

Joe: Wow.

Bethany: And basically American Type Founders in in the before times, i.e. the late 1800s and early 1900s, there were many type foundries across America. And then American Type Founders basically went and bought them all, and consolidated into this like powerhouse. So whilst others in Germany, there are a couple different players that we've talked about. American Type Founders is kind of…

Joe: The only shop in town.

Bethany: So the reason that I say that she is the only first half of the 20th century American type designer who is a woman that we know of, is because in 1948, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, or Aiga, which still exists, they had an exhibit called American Type Designers and their Typefaces on exhibit. And she is listed in this catalog as, quote, the only American woman type designer known.

Bethany: And she's it. She's the show.

Joe: She's so definitive listing there.

Bethany: So a bit about Cowell’s background. She was born in Michigan in 1881. She went to the school of Art Institute in Chicago and studied with people like John Vanderpoel and Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt, sorry in advance for the amazing foreign pronunciation. And he taught her Japanese woodcut techniques, which really becomes like a thing she's known for in her artwork.

And she does watercolors. She does prints. She exhibits in shows from 1909 to 1943. She won a bronze medal for prints she showed at San Francisco's Pan Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915. She wrote a volume on the making of woodblock color prints. She hand lettered and illustrated books over her own poetry. She also had work examples in a lot of trade publications like sketchbook and the printing, Art and lettering for printers and designers.

She belonged to the Chicago Society of Artists and the Chicago and New York Societies of Teachers. I mean, she was a working artist, like she was an independent lady who was working for decades. She did a lot of advertising work. And so her hand lettering shows up in a bunch of marketing materials, for Chicago clients of hers, like Marshall Field's department store, the Chicago Savings Bank.

She wrote a bunch of, an article series in Sketchbook in 1904, which talks about hand lettering and like how to do it, which to me, there's a lot of similarities with the typeface that she then later designs that looks a lot like this. 

W. A. Dwiggins, who, if you're into type design and graphic design, he's a pretty big deal, he commissioned work by her in the 1910s that showed up in Happy Land. She also was the first woman featured in a profile series about designers and illustrators, that the graphic arts put out in 1913. We'll have links in the show notes and that has her fine arts work, her advertising work. She worked for the Works in Progress Administration's Federal Art project in 1937. She showed and other exhibitions, and the Library of Congress mounted an exhibition of her work in Washington in 1945.

Joe: Oh, wow.

Bethany: And then she kind of, like, drops off the map. And one of the things that Lauren Elda gain, who we're going to be talking to in just a few moments, did in her research, is that Cowell's death date is different in different spots. It's given throughout the 60s. It's given as 1954, in one place.

Joe: So people just didn't know if she was alive or what happened to her.

Bethany: It just it's just unclear. And so she moved out of Chicago. And Lauren posits that so many places cite her death year is 1954. But actually, it's just the time she left Chicago.

Joe: Yeah.

Bethany: And so Lauren found that she actually died in 1961.

Joe: Oh my gosh.

Bethany: And found, like, evidence of that. And so we talk a bit about that in the upcoming conversation.

Joe: Just all the things you do as a part of archival recovery.

Bethany: Yeah. Basically running down rabbit holes.

Joe: Chasing down any lead.

Bethany: It's journalism, but with dead people. So today we're talking with Lauren Alt again, who, as she says, is many things similar.

Joe: To the people we profiled in these episodes. Our guests are as multifaceted.

Bethany: She did a master's thesis entitled A Woman's Type Early Woman Type Designers in 20th Century Book History, which is probably the most comprehensive, massive overview of women in metal type design to date that I have run into. And she finished it in September of 2021 and it is freely available online. We'll have notes in the show notes. We're talking today about Elizabeth Colwell, but all the other people that we're talking about in this season, she touches on as well in her work.

Bethany: So she's been a really big resource for my own scholaring in this field. And also like printed type specimen with examples of the fonts that these different people designed. And it's really lovely. So, so yeah. So that's who we're talking with today. And she's going to give us insights into all things Elizabeth Colwell and working as a woman artist and how she got into this whole book, book vibe.

Joe: This whole book vibe.

Bethany: Yeah. It's just.

Joe: Vibes. Once you get into it, you realize it's just vibes all the way down.

Bethany: So as we get started, can you tell us your name and what do you do? Who are you?

Lauren: Well, my name is Lauren Lane. To gain, and I, I am I'm a lot of things. Some days I know what I am, some days I don't. Right now I work as a policy analyst for the provincial government in B.C., but I'm also, I guess, kind of a woman of many hobbies. I studied literature and have done that for quite some time.

Lauren: I'm also interested in, I guess you would say, kind of traditional arts and crafts. So I like to so I like to do pottery and I like to do letterpress printing, although I find that one a little bit harder to manage in a 800 square foot apartment. Hard to find a printing press that you can hang out with in your spare time. That's kind of how I got interested in in women type design through my interest in, letterpress printing and, through my interest in books and printed artifacts as, as a student.

Bethany: How did you get into type history? It sounds like you came in through letterpress.

Lauren: Yes, exactly. So when I was in my undergraduate program at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, there is a print shop there, the Harry Smith Print Shop, and I took as one of my elective courses a letter press printing course with a really great instructor, and I just fell completely in love with it as a lot of people that work with it do, it sort of becomes a bit of an addiction.

When I moved to Canada many years later, I was just here as a visitor, so I wasn't able to work or study. And so I had a lot of free time. And, I was able to find sort of a work trade kind of situation, but I would help out at a print shop and in exchange have access to the equipment.

And that was when I started working on some, some poetry projects. So my first, my undergraduate degree was in poetry. And when I was working at the print shop, I had just finished a manuscript and I wanted to letterpress print the covers for the chapbook that I had written. The entire project had been kind of worked on by women, and so I just got it in my head that I wanted to use the typeface designed by a woman to print the covers of this poetry chapbook.

And so then, of course, the next question was, well, which typefaces were designed by women? And this was a surprisingly difficult question to answer. And it turns out that of the hundreds, maybe thousands of metal typefaces, only a handful were designed by women or were attributed to women. And that is what sent me on this adventure. Like following leads and going on rabbit holes.

Lauren: Rabbit holes are the best thing ever, and for a while it was just my job to go down. Rabbit holes.

Bethany: So talk to me about this MA thesis that you wrote. You've talked a bit about how you got into finding women in typography, but more broadly, like what inspired you to do this work that combines type design and book history and literature all into one beautiful package? It is beautiful.

Lauren: Also, thank you and its beauty is definitely a team accomplishment. The the designer of the essay booklet just did an incredible job and the calligrapher that worked on the cover of the folder that houses the type specimens, just incredible. Every. Yeah, it's it's really lovely. I was like I said, I was working on this poetry chapbook and looking for a typeface that was designed by a woman, and there was some information online about the different typefaces designed by women.

And there was information online about women type designers, but there was not really a comprehensive sort of list of all the metal typefaces that were designed by women. There were sort of these lists along the lines of like, this is kind of what we know. You know, what we've put together. Here's some basic information. It's not necessarily comprehensive.

I applied to grad school with the idea to create some type of project that, like, comprehensively collected all of the information that we have available to us and some of the information not available. I wanted to fill some of the gaps in information that we had about the women who are attributed with designing a metal typeface that had been commercially produced for use in letter press printing, and the sort of relevant time frame for this is the early 1900s.

And as a letter press printer, you know what I really wanted to do was print. And that's the kind of the most interesting part about this to me was the type itself. Like that the actual metal type. And in the process of printing. So I knew that that was going to be a part of it. And I started collecting the type faces just by searching online and, and talking to other printers.

And, you know, a little bit of kismet. I was able to find some of these, these typefaces and print with them. So we knew that my, my supervisor, Ian Higgins and I, we knew that the specimens were going to be a part of the project. Types. Print newly printed type specimens. And then of course there would be the research component as well, putting together all of this information.

But then I also realized that the audience for this is really, you know, typographers, of course, type designers and letterpress printers. And these are people who are very serious about design and very serious about the way that things look and the way that they function. So we sort of realized that the project actually needed to be beautiful, as well as, you know, informational.

And so that was where the idea of creating this essay booklet, that was designed by a book designer, came into it. And it has just a really incredible way of organizing the information, the images, the notes, the citations. It's just it's really beautifully designed. And then the final piece of the puzzle was that I knew that I wanted this information to be freely available for anyone to use or access.

So instead of going the traditional route of having it published through a journal, what I decided to do was self-publish this and ask my university library to digitize a copy of the project and put it online. And so they were able to do that. They created a really beautiful digitization. And so there's a lot of different pieces, but that's kind of how it all came together.

Bethany: What I do love is how there's this accretion, I would guess of like, like someone did a master's thesis in the 90s. Right. And then, like, alphabets has like, a list that everyone references. It's like there's this list with some stuff on it and how all this work has built on top of itself. And like, you know, as we've talked about before, you found stuff that filled gaps that people hadn't done yet, which is pretty cool.

Bethany: So, and it is really beautiful. And we'll have a link in the show notes so that people can see and go look at your cool stuff. Today's episode is all about Elizabeth Colwell, who designed Colwell Hand letter. How would you describe this typeface to someone who's not seen it before?

Lauren: Colwell, Handletter and italic. It's a Jenson style typeface, so that's a reference to Nicholas Jenson, a 15th century Venetian printer. Oh, yeah. So this this style of typeface, it's kind of had a resurgence in popularity in the early 20th century. So other kind of typefaces in this style are Doves Roman by Emery Walker and Cloister Old Style and Centaur, which are very common, popular, well-known typefaces.

And the, the kind of hallmark of this style is that it's it evokes kind of the human touch. So it evokes handwritten letter forms. It's got a very strong calligraphic influence, but it also kind of retains that uniformity of shape and sort of evenness of weight of the letters that makes that makes it very legible for printing. It evokes the way that you would write with, with like a broad nib pen. So the letters get thicker and thinner, where, you know, the movement of your hand would alter the angle of the nib of the pen, and so affect the thickness and thinness of the, of the flow of ink. And it's, it's got kind of the smooth letter strokes that, you know, you would have if you were writing in calligraphy.

Another quality of it that links it to the Jenson style typefaces is that the letters are quite wide, like they take up a fair bit of space. They're not condensed at all. And one of the kind of main books that I looked at when I was studying, type design and studying type faces was Elements of Typographic Style, and he describes Jenson style letters as full of sensuous and unhurried light and space, which I think is just like such a beautiful phrase, full of sensuous and unhurried light and space, like it's just like these letters are languid. They're like, they're on a chaise lounge. They're, you know, they're just they're having a nice afternoon.

And yeah, I think, I think Colwell's letters do really reflect this. And then there's also like a lot of variation, which you would have with a handwritten letter as well. Like they're not all perfectly uniform. Some letters taper kind of smoothly at the endings. Some have teardrop terminals. So they end with like this, this gentle swelling at the tips or almost like a ball shape. And then and then other letters have like a rectangular serifs, like a nice abrupt serif at the end. So yeah, just a really beautiful, I think, a really beautiful typeface. My favorite letter is the uppercase T. I just think it's, it's very beautiful.

It has kind of a lot of these different components that I've been talking about. It has like a the nice swooping flow of the, the horizontal stroke at the top of the T, it has a few different of these, these different styles of endings, stroke endings. And I liked it so much actually, that when I printed the chapbook cover, I capitalized the word, even though you're not supposed to do that. But I just really wanted to get the capital T in there.

Bethany: Oh, I love this, I love that, I do love how anyone who gets, like, even a little bit into type design or just type as a thing, like you always have favorite letters and an asset. And like as someone whose last name starts with Q, I have a lot of like feelings about QS and how many of them are really ugly. But the Q in this is very good because it's like a weird like it's like I like the Q, it's like because it's like, an okay zero with like on top of like a little nest of it's like descender. And I just, I like it, I'm into it. So as something that came out of 1916, we do have this sort of organic like Art Nouveau influence a bit. And we're sort of laying the groundwork for mid-century modern esthetics, which it's a little cleaner, which we'll be talking about in the next episode.

Lauren: I'd say it's very different than what you start to see in like in mid-century type design, which of course, like reflected in in Germany a lot in that in the Bauhaus movement, this sort of more utilitarian approach and a more kind of bold, you get the you get the type, the characters that are the same weight throughout the entire character that don't have the, the influence of the pen anymore, the broad nib pen anymore so that the characters don't change weight throughout the, throughout the character.

Lauren: And this is, yeah, just a very different kind of style than that. More, more decorative, I would say. And that is also the the arts and crafts influence of the time as well, that the American Arts and Crafts movement was very big in the first portion of the 1900s. And, so that was a part of this as well. And maybe we'll talk about that a little bit more. But when we talk about some of the other stuff that Colwell did, because she was not a type designer by trade, she was actually an artist and a letterer.

Bethany: Yeah. So, I mean, let's get into some of that sort of thinking through, like, what are some of your favorite examples of her other work besides this typeface that we've talked about?

Lauren: So I really love her prints. So she was also woodblock printer and an etcher. And during the kind of middle and latter portion of her career, she did a lot of exhibiting of her woodblock prints and her etchings. She, she, she showed work in, in exhibitions in New York quite a bit and, and actually all over the country.

Lauren: Some of her work was shown at the Panama Pacific Expo, which was like a big expo celebrating the opening of the Panama Canal that was in San Francisco. She had work shown in New Mexico, Cleveland, Detroit and even in Italy. So her the bulk of her career was really spent as an artist. And I think her woodblock prints and her etchings are, in my opinion, they're really beautiful.

Lauren: The woodblock prints are in the Japanese style, so they're sort of they're kind of like a there's a flatness to them and a very kind of like blocky color scheme. And they're kind of simplistic, very, very kind of peaceful to look at. They're mostly lit, they're landscapes. And then the etchings have quite a bit more detail, like more shading.

Lauren: More. Yeah. Just more shading, more detail. And they're to me, they're pretty evocative. There's a there's a still life in the, in the project. So at the end, at the end of each section in my essay, there's a little chunk of images for each of the type designers. And so you if you go to the digital version online, you can see some of these prints that I'm talking about.

Lauren: There's a seaside landscape woodcut and, and a couple of her etchings as well. And, the etchings are all in black and white and. Yeah, they're just they're kind of about to me, they, they speak about like sort of the beauty in like the everyday.

Bethany: Yeah. And another, another thing that I understand really and like find so amazing is the longevity of her career. I mean she's, she's printing and writing and she's writing, you know, about lettering and sketchbook in 1904. She's, you know, doing all these periodicals. She's doing all this advertising work. So it's like it's such a range of artistic and commercial beyond, just like pick a medium.

Bethany: She probably did something, you know.

Lauren: Painter, printer, letterer, poet, teacher she did, she taught art classes as well. In the essay. I sort of go through her career in like the early stages, the middle stages and the later stages. And you're absolutely right. Like she the last sort of reference to her work that I was able to find was in let me just see here, 1944.

So she would have been 63, 62, 63, something like that. And she started at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1898. So when she was about 17 years old. So, yeah, she was working her entire life and, as an artist and in all of the census, all of the censuses that I found, that's, you know, what she listed as her occupation, either an artist working at home.

At one point in her career, she was employed by the Works Progress Administration. So that was part of the, like, New Deal era programs to support artists in the depression era was what was called the federal Art project. And she, for a while is receiving a monthly salary under the federal Art project. And so this was just a way that the government employed artists during the depression years.

And it was also a way to kind of like harness artistic American artistic potential. It was sort of like a nationalist thing as well. And yeah, just yeah, very interesting, very long career, as a working class artist.

Bethany: So one of the things you talked about earlier is how you got into this whole world of women and type, through making your own poetry chapbook. And I know that cool hand lettered and illustrated editions of some of her own poetry, have you seen any of these?

Lauren: Yeah. So I have seen some of her hand lettered editions of her own poetry. There's a couple pictures of one of them in the in the essay. So if you go to the digitized version online, figure five and six, there are these are images of her, her hand lettered book which is called Songs of Tristram and Assault. So it's songs of Tristan and Isolde, but spelled a bit differently.

And there is another one called Songs and Sonnets. So there's two like hand lettered books of her own poetry, and these are digitized by the Internet Archive. So they're available online. They're in the public domain, which is really cool. And then there's also another, another book that she hand lettered for blue Sky press that is available online as well.

And that was that was digitized by one of the libraries that I was working with during my research is also available for people to look at. And yeah, they're really cool. There's some illustrations she illustrated, like the ornamental capital letters on on each of the pages. And those are really beautiful as well. There's like floral components, leaves and flowers and intertwined with the letters.

And then of course the lettering itself. And you can definitely see you can definitely see similarities from her hand lettering to the typeface to the Colwell typeface. And her career leading up to the issuing of Colwell hand letter was very much she was doing a lot of hand lettering at the time for, advertisements, and for the blue Sky press and for her own, her own books of poetry.

And I, I suspect that that was kind of how she made a name for herself was as a as a letter and as someone working in advertising. And I don't know this, I don't I don't know exactly what the circumstances were of her being hired by American type founder company to create this typeface. I think that her her skills as a hand letter were what led her to create this typeface. And you can definitely see the similarities between her hand lettering and the typeface itself.

Bethany: The American Institute of Graphic Arts did an exhibition about American type designers in 1947 48, and Cowell is the only woman in that catalog. She is labeled as a letterer and a American woman type designer, and one of them says that she's the only American woman type designer known. And so one thing I'm thinking about is, you know, why bring this up?

Why one? Do you have any ideas about why that might be the case? And also, you know, why highlight that in this kind of compendium?

Lauren: Yeah. So you're absolutely right that, in the exhibition catalog for that exhibit, which is called American Type Designers and their work is very much, you know, about American type designers. She was noted in that as the only American woman type designer known and based on kind of the definition of woman type designer that I use in my essay. She is the only American type designer of her generation. She was the only American type woman type designer of her generation. We're talking about women who were attributed with typefaces. These were their typeface designs. Women participated in typeface design in many other ways. But in terms of attribution and creative direction, she's the only one that we know of as of yet in America and in her generation.

One quote from the feature on her that was done in the Graphic Arts magazine, I think answers your question really well. So, in terms of why would this have been noted in, in the exhibition catalog? Like, why would they have brought this up? Why would they have noted that she's, you know, the only woman?

Yeah. In 1913, Colwell was featured in the Graphic arts magazine. There was this series that they did called The Work of Dot, Dot, Dot and it was a series that highlighted standout designers in the advertising field. And she was the first woman to be featured in this series. And the editor of the magazine, Henry Louis Johnson, wrote, it's been an axiom among designers, although just why it is hard to say, that women cannot do good lettering.

Bethany: Sorry, I got something stuck in my throat there.

Lauren: I also love the like. Just why? It is hard to say. Like, is it Henry? Is it hard to say?

Bethany: Patriarchy hurts us all. That's what I'm saying. 

Lauren: Yeah, I was thinking about this this morning. I was like, maybe it's Maybelline, maybe it's patriarchy. And then he goes on to say, Miss Colwell, with many other women designers, offers direct proof to the contrary. So I think, yeah, I think it was a bit of a phenomenon. And it, her success was notable. It was exceptional. The things that we do know about Colwell’s, life, I think, paint a little bit of a picture that starts to answer that question around why she was able to be the only woman of her generation in America that produced and was attributed with, commercial typeface.

And part of that is the fact that she supported herself as an artist throughout her entire career. She wasn't married. She lived with her mother most of her life, and she never had any children. And her mother, as far as I know, never worked for a wage. She did receive her husband's Civil War pension, but what the data tells us about full well is that she supported herself as an artist.

She was a working class artist, and I don't know about you, but I know that for me, like financial motivation is a primary driver for, you know, being being motivated to achieve things and accomplish things and, and produce things. So that may be speaks a little bit to how she was able to get to the kind of level of career that she did.

Bethany: I think what you're touching on about how she didn't marry, she was sort of an atypical woman. I don't think that's as exceptional as maybe we think it is, if that makes sense. Like, I feel like we have a lot of examples of people who don't do what's expected throughout history. But I think that your work, you know, in this, in this work that we've both been doing about reclaiming or sort of making a centralized spot for information that has been found so that we can, like, keep finding more is like really important.

And I think that it's interesting how in some ways, the exceptionalism narrative allows things just to continue as they are because you're like, well, we had a woman, so it's fine. And we still see this logic working today. And that's like very interesting.

Lauren: There were two really cool things that happened when I was researching for, well, a lot of the research that I did on her biographical information was done on Ancestry.com, and in that process, I ended up coming across a photo that said that it was a photo of her family. And yeah, so I was like, where did this photo come from? Who put this online?

And I ended up sending a message to the person that had published it on Ancestry.com. His name's Bob Snyder, and he told me that when his grandfather died, they, you know, they were going through the house and they found some photos of her family and also some prints. Some of her pieces of art.

Bethany: Woah, that's cool.

Lauren: Yeah. My mind was pretty blown by this. And, you know, I'm talking to this person via, you know, email correspondence. And, and he was able to send me some of some images of the prints that they found. One of them is called City Roofs. And there's a photo of it in the project. And it's really nice.

It's kind of like a skyline, of a few different roofs. And it's snowing and there's snow collected on the roofs, and there's a bit of like a, a bare tree as well. I really like it. And, and apparently his, his grandfather took classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. So his, his theory is that they met there and became friends and kind of maintained that friendship. And there was the house where these images and photos were found was in Ridge Farm, Illinois.

Lauren: And that's where Colwell, where Colwell passed away. So she she was a resident of a nursing home in that area. And she was buried at Yankee Point Cemetery, which was also in that area. The other really interesting thing that happened. So I kept seeing Colwell’s birth and death years on various different websites, like the Art Institute of Chicago website and, you know, other museums and art gallery websites that have pieces of her work had her year of death listed.

Lauren: I think it was either as 1964 or 1966, 1968, but there were a couple different years that were listed, and these various sites, many sources cite her her death year as 1954. So that set my spidey senses tingling, and I was like, okay, what is the actual year? And you'll recall, I said a lot of my work was just going down rabbit holes.

Lauren: And and this was one of them. And through like right towards the end of my project, I was able to get in touch with the Illiana Genealogical and Historical Society, and they actually found her death certificate. And so we were able to put that put that question to bed.

Bethany: So cool. So do you have besides your fabulous thesis project, any advice where people can learn more about Colwell or doing letterpress themselves? Resources you recommend?

Lauren: You can find examples of her work online. And what's really interesting is there's actually sometimes pieces of her work come up for auction, as well. And, you know, they don't sell for two to much money. I think I for one that sold for I think the highest I've seen them go for is like $1,200. When I was working on my project, I was like, one day, one day I'll buy one.

And yeah, and I think for learning about letter price and maybe getting involved in letter press of the best thing to do is probably look for your local society or printing company that is, that is working in this area. They're historical societies in most of the major cities, for sure. And then also in some of the some of the smaller cities as well.

You could contact the American Printing History Association. They might be able to direct folks towards printing history like communities and organizations. They have various chapters across the country. So so they might have more information. But if there's like a print shop or a printing history museum or there's a lot of great places that do like classes for kids and workshops and that kind of thing.

And then, of course, there is the all powerful YouTube that has endless tutorials. But I think it's really important for this craft to continue. There's not a lot of people, there are a lot of people doing it, but that number is certainly less than it has been in the past. And it's really important for this craft to continue for many years to come.

So the more people that get interested in it, the better, because it is an art form just like any other art form. And we can value it and study it in the same way. So it has, it has academic and creative and artistic importance. Obviously.

Bethany: You totally do. You know, finding what you're looking for. Where do you want people to find you online in real life?

Lauren: Yeah. So, chronically offline person respect. Well, I try to be as much as possible. I sometimes sneak on to Instagram to, like, look at sewing inspiration and that kind of thing. But I think if if people want to find the project, please have a look at it. It's beautiful and there's so much more information than I was able to share in this conversation.

But you can Google a woman's type UVic libraries and Google will present you with the digitization of the project where you can view the entire thing, all of the sections on the all the different women type designers that I studied, not just for a while, as well as the newly printed type specimens that were printed by me and other printers using the original metal type designed by these women.

Bethany: So cool. Well, thank you for one. All your detective work and this great thesis, which I'll have a link, so people can go look at it and, and thank you for taking the time. This was really great.

Lauren: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

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Bethany: Reun Covered is created and produced by me. Bethany Qualls. Our editor is Joe DeGrand, and we are supported by listeners like you, like what you hear? tell your friends. Subscribe to Re Uncovered wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. Positive is great. Thanks for listening. We'll see you again in the archives soon.