After his very high profile fall-out with his former partner, famed type designer Tobias Frere-Jones has been keeping busy and recently launched a new blog—in his first post, he documents a fascinating discovery.
Noticing that the addresses of various type foundries found in old type specimen books seemed to be clustered together, he went on Google Earth to map out the locations of all the foundries active in New York City from 1828 to 1909.
Even though most of the buildings, and even streets, listed on these addresses no longer exist, it is still clear that there used to be an entire neighborhood for typography in Manhattan.
The typographer made a guess that the type foundries were trying to keep close to the newspapers—their biggest customers—who were in turn “huddled around their most frequent subject and adversary, City Hall”.
What do you think of Frere-Jone’s discovery and conclusion? Read his entire post on NYC’s lost type neighborhood here.
[via Fast Co. Design]