It is with a heavy heart that I must announce The Dale Guild Type Foundry will be going on a hiatus. Effective June 1^st DGTF will be packed up and moving west. The ebay store will remain open.

This began to come about in late 2012 when Theo informed me that DGTF needed to move from its location on his property. Dan and I agreed that it is in the foundry’s best interest to part ways as business partners since it was my wish to move the foundry to Salt Lake City, Utah.

There have been many disappointments for DGTF and me personally this year. Perhaps the greatest is the Russell Maret’s cancellation of the Gremolata and Cancellarsca Milanese project I have been working on for the past 8 months. The job turned out to be much more difficult than I ever anticipated. The sheer size of the job, the number of complex ligatures, the engraving protocols required to make a smaller sized design of this nature work were all beyond what I thought they would be. Despite the set backs I faced working through this project I always intended to complete it. Given these set backs Russell decided to terminate the project and I am now forced to pay him back the portion of the job that has not been completed.

One of the biggest issues I was faced with when deciding how to go about moving the foundry is the large amount of machinery. It is a daunting to say the least and would require a great deal of square footage and cost to move and set up again. The only way to meaningfully trim any equipment meant shrinking the current catalog. While DGTF’s tradition lies in American Type Founders I feel it is time to create a new tradition for type founding. One based on education and instruction to keep the most important part alive, the knowledge. I will continue my efforts to find a way to use the machinery I am keeping to produce limited castings of the existing DGTF typefaces, a limited catalog of ATF designs and continue to produce new designs in metal.

If you have ever put off purchasing type from DGTF I ask you to wait no longer. In order to avoid selling many of the type founding artifacts and the machinery necessary to continue the foundry please help to clean out my stock of fonts so DGTF can start fresh out west. The past four years I have been running the foundry have been difficult, but the support all of you have shown me throughout my short time as a type founder has meant more to me than I can express here.

Thank you all so very much. This isn’t an end, but hopefully a new beginning.

As always,

Micah

The Cloister Light Face design was initiated at the request of John Henry Nash for use in his unfinished bible. Nash was looking for a version of the typeface that when printed on dampened, hand-made paper would retain the weight and blackness of the page of Cloister Old Style had when printed on smooth stock.

This 18pt. Parsons font DOES NOT include the 36pt. long ascenders and descenders. These special characters require pivotal casting and will be available as a separate font.

PLEASE NOTE: A slight issue arose with this casting Centaur form the original matrices. When the matrices arrived at The Dale Guild I examined them and determined that they were not completely compatible with my machines. Working with the Rochester Institute of Technology I made a superficial alternation so that they could at least be cast from using a Barth caster.
The more serious alteration that was needed regarding the drive or depth of the matrix could not be done since it would inappropriately alter these historic artifacts.
Given the excitement and interest in this historic casting I have decided to still offer the type with the proviso that the type IS NOT Anglo/American type height (.918″), it is .006 of an inch over height at .924″. The height difference is the thickness of one sheet of tympan paper, the type can still be easily mixed with .918″ type with little to no make ready.

The 36pt. Verona capitals fonts are hand cast using The Dale Guild Type Foundry’s rebuilt MacKellar, Smiths, and Jordan medium pivotal caster. Hand cast and hand finished, these fonts of Verona mark the first pivotal cast fonts the Dale Guild has released in many years.