The first few words of this project have been printed. Set in our new 40cicero HWT Artz wood type (i. e. approx 170mm tall), freshly cut by Hamilton in Wisconsin.

Before we continue with words containing problematic combinations like AY, LY, LV and others, we need to upgrade to a professional kerning saw. Type this size is too expensive to risk destroying by swinging at it with a handheld jigsaw.

The words are printed on 35×50cm (i. e. half the size of our monthly posters) MetaPaper Warm White Rough from original wood type on a Korrex Berlin proof press. There will only be 20 of each word and we haven’t quite decided if we want to sell them. Once all 30 or 40 words will have been printed, we may display them at our studio. As soon as the first three or four were printed (by my son, Dylan, and my assistant, Ferdinand), the two of them started making sentences. Which is the point of the exercise.

We may add a list of German words, but they will have to be with four letters.

Making awkward combinations like A and Y look better is hard work when you have to apply it to large type made from wood. You have to cut a bit from the top right of the A and another bit from the bottom left part of the Y. Cut too much and the letter won’t align properly anymore. Most of those bad combinations can be dealt with by adding space between the other characters. In the case of the HWT Artz typeface, however, too much such tracking makes it look weak and wobbly. So we got the jigsaw and cut P, A and Y. While at it, L and V also got this treatment.

The poster is printed on MetaPaper Rough Warm White 160 gsm in Black and Pantone Warm Red ink. From original wood and metal type (HWT Artz 16cicero and Akzidenz Grotesk Medium 60pt) on our Korrex Frankfurt, 50×70 cm.

The 50 posters each are num­bered and signed by Erik Spiek­er­mann. We ship every­where and you can pay by Pay­Pal. Price is the same in these cur­rencies: £, $, €; always 98, includ­ing tax (where applic­a­ble) and ship­ping, wrapped in a solid card­board tube. Orders with shipping address please to info@p98a.com.

The trouble with limited runs is that popular motifs run out very quickly and we have to disappoint a lot of people. We cannot simple reprint the same subject, as that would contradict the principle. We have, however, redesigned and then printed the same statement before: »Alles ist fertig, es muss nur noch gemacht werden« was so popular that a second run had become inevitable, albeit looking quite different from the first one.

The other very popular theme has been my motto »Don’t work for assholes, don’t work with assholes«. The former part of this statement is the one that most colleagues want to display on their studio walls. So we went ahead and printed just that sentence. It is set in 20cicero (about 21pica) Akzidenz Grotesk Medium. These large fonts do not have very many characters in a set. When we ran out of lower case o, we had to insert the last one from the Bold weight of the same typeface. It is a little larger on the body but ends up looking as if we wanted to stress the meaning of the word with an extra large o. Necessity as the mother of invention. BTW: 20cicero is a cap height of approx. 85mm.

As always, the poster is printed on MetaPaper Rough Warm White 160 gsm in Black and Pantone Warm Red ink. From original wood and metal type on our Korrex Frankfurt, 50×70 cm.

The 50 posters each are num­bered and signed by Erik Spiek­er­mann. We ship every­where and you can pay by Pay­Pal. Price is the same in these cur­rencies: £, $, €; always 98, includ­ing tax (where applic­a­ble) and ship­ping, wrapped in a solid card­board tube. Orders with shipping address please to info@p98a.com.

Easter holidays and travel have delayed the production of our poster for April. The first run wasn’t good enough because even with wood type there is a limit to what can be done without kerning. The word PAY in all caps (and that’s all I have for the HWT Artz font) falls apart and becomes illegible. So Ferdinand and Jan had to get the hacksaw out. Spot the difference (and the other manual kern):

As always, the poster is printed on MetaPaper Rough Warm White 160 gsm in Black and Pantone Warm Red ink. From original wood and metal type (HWT Artz 16cicero and Akzidenz Grotesk Medium 60pt) on our Korrex Frankfurt, 50×70 cm.

The 50 posters each are num­bered and signed by Erik Spiek­er­mann. We ship every­where and you can pay by Pay­Pal. Price is the same in these cur­rencies: £, $, €; always 98, includ­ing tax (where applic­a­ble) and ship­ping, wrapped in a solid card­board tube. Orders with shipping address please to info@p98a.com.

Some of our posters are out of print and we had to reprint those motives, albeit in a different style, lest we break the promise of a limited run for each of them. Here they are all on one page. As we take photos of the printed pieces on the workshop floor at different times, with different cameras and even different photographers, they come out quite, well: different. But they’re all printed on the same MetaPaper Rough Warm White 160 gsm in Black and Pantone Warm Red ink. From original wood type on our Korrex Frankfurt, 50×70 cm.

The 50 posters each are num­bered and signed by Erik Spiek­er­mann. We ship every­where and you can pay by Pay­Pal. Price is the same in these cur­rencies: £, $, €; always 98, includ­ing tax (where applic­a­ble) and ship­ping, wrapped in a solid card­board tube. Orders with shipping address please to info@p98a.com.

The calendar is different, see here:

The poster for March 2015 is, as always, 50×70cm in size (approx 20×28in), printed 2 colours on 160gsm Meta­Pa­per Rough. It is the second run of our most popular motive, albeit this time set in a different typeface. We just got this chunky Block Heavy in 16 cicero and welcomed the opportunity to try it out. It prints almost too perfectly for wood type. Doesn’t need much pressure, but a lot of ink. Weight has its price.

There are 50 prints of each poster, num­bered and signed by Erik Spiek­er­mann. We ship every­where and you can pay by Pay­Pal. Price is the same in these cur­rencies: £, $, €; always 98, includ­ing tax (where applic­a­ble) and ship­ping, wrapped in a solid card­board tube.

Orders with shipping address please to info@p98a.com. We’ve been promising a proper shopping basket for this site for a while and hope to get it done before the next poster gets printed.

The second poster for 2015 is, as always, 50×70cm in size (approx 20×28in), printed 2 colours on 160gsm Meta­Pa­per Rough. In case you didn’t notice: it’s in German, meaning: Everything is ready, it just needs to be done. We printed the same saying before, but in black only. That one was very popular and all 50 prints sold out immediately. So here’s a new print run in two colours. The type is 16 cicero (approx 17 pica) HWT Artz, the one I designed for the Hamilton Wood Type Museum to cut in wood for us. These letters are from the second production run, cut in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, earlier this year. The outlines and counters are clean, the type has the proper German height and they print really well.

There are 50 prints of each poster, num­bered and signed by Erik Spiek­er­mann. We ship every­where and you can pay by Pay­Pal. Price is the same in these cur­rencies: £, $, €; always 98, includ­ing tax (where applic­a­ble) and ship­ping, wrapped in a solid card­board tube.

Orders with shipping address please to info@p98a.com. We should have a proper shopping basket for this site soon, which will make buying a poster much easier.

In case you didn’t know what my EDC is, don’t worry, I didn’t either until a gentleman from everydaycarry wrote and asked for a photograph of the contents of the bag I carry every day. That request seemed harmless enough and offered an occasion to go through said bag and clean it out. Once all the old receipts and boarding ticket stubs were gone, I was left with the bare essentials. So I spread them on a cutting mat and took a photograph. As the little Sony RX100 that I always carry with me had to be in the photo, I took it with my Leica M. Made for a sharp picture although it was handheld from an awkward position.

And, yes, I do use all those pens: they’re all different and each one serves a different purpose. Just like my bicycles, albeit cheaper.

Characters make words, and words make sentences. If you had all these words printed on paper in front of you, you couldn’t help yourself but would want to arrange them into sentences. So we intend to print these and more words, regardless of whether they’re nouns, pronouns, adjectives or verbs. We’ll also do a similar exercise in German but may have to go to four-letter words as German is not known for too many short words. As Mark Twain famously said: “German words are so long, they have perspective.”

Not sure whether it’ll be in the HWT Artz typeface (which only has upper case so far) or in a new one we’re about to cut, but print we shall.