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Dan X. Solo: The Horse and Buggy Printer [Gene Gable]

Gene Gable reviews Dan Solo's contributions. He writes: Dan X. Solo spent a lifetime building Solotype, one of the world's most interesting type collections. For three decades he ran his business with unparalleled character and panache. Type designers and graphic artists tend to fall into two categories. You either like ornate old typefaces or hate them. I'm a big fan -- the more ornate and over the top the better. So it was a terrific find when I came across a box of original Solotype catalogs, brochures, and other promotional material. The Solotype shop closed in the early 1990s, leaving a big hole in the availability of unique and unusual type designs. Dan X. Solo, who still lives in Alameda, California, was born in 1928. For his ninth birthday his grandfather gave him a small Kelsey letterpress, and he quickly became a self-described boy printer. He started collecting typefaces in earnest at age 14, and the Solotype collection officially began. After dropping out of high school, Solo became a radio announcer and sometime-actor. In 1949, the 21-year-old put together a magic act and toured the West Coast with some success. Along the way he continued to collect old typefaces, which were plentiful around his native Oakland and the San Francisco Bay area. In 1962, Solo decided to see if he could make a living from his type collection, which by then numbered about 1,000 unique fonts. He printed 4,000 catalogs, sent them to ad agencies around the country, and waited for the orders to come in. This flyer is from 1962 when the Oakland shop opened. The shop took off, as the '60s were a time of design experimentation and there was a keen interest among some designers in ornate and unusual type designs. Solo didn't just offer typesetting. He was a one-man consulting service on the history and appropriate use of his type designs. In 1974 Solo connected with Hayward Cirker, owner of Dover Publications, and a long relationship began that resulted in 30 books showing various type collections, mostly organized by era or theme. The Solotype catalog, reproduced by Dover, reached graphic artists all over the world and inspired a generation of type designers. The type designs weren't the only unusual thing about Solotype. Its business practices and the attitude that Solo fostered were unique. Here are several sections from early Solotype catalogs addressing the way Solo preferred (or insisted) on doing business. Unlike most type shops of the era, which were accustomed to being available to customers on demand, Solotype closed every year for the month of October. During this time, Solo traveled around the country and the world, collecting more type designs and fonts. In the early '90s, Dan X. Solo realized that the digital era was rendering his services obsolete. By that time, he had a collection of more than 13,000 type designs. During that decade he did convert many of his designs to digital format and sold them as collections through Dover, but the type business was changing, and bookstores were not the preferred distribution method for type. Since many of the designs in the Solotype collection are public domain and not associated with any active foundry, they do crop up here and there, mostly in low-priced, generic font collections. But of the thousands of Solotype designs, probably only a few hundred can be had in digital form from any foundry. Perhaps a future resurgence in historic typestyles will make it worthwhile for someone to digitize those that remain. The Solotype collection is an important and historically significant part of type history, even if considered lowbrow by some type purists. Some images scanned by Gables: i, ii, iii, iv, v.

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Dan X. Solo ⦿ Letterpress ⦿