Designing the early history of typography in Brazil

Abstract

Many histories of typography in Brazil have been told from the point of view of book and newspaper publishing. A history of typography in Brazil as part of design history, however, is still to be written, or, better yet, designed. In order to help address this gap in knowledge, a digital platform able to gather data and provide information on the early history of letterpress printing in the city of São Paulo has been devised and implemented by a research team coordinated by the authors of this paper. In addition to textual and numerical information on over 200 trade printers, type foundries, type distributors, and their staff, the platform provides interactive maps showing the location of these companies, and a timeline of their activity from 1827 to 1927. It also offers a reconstruction of the printers’ repertoires—samples of the typefaces they used, built from thousands of images collected from printed pages. The result is a rich set of data accessible by anyone interested in learning more about the early history of typography in São Paulo, gathered in a system that allows for systematic updates, and which can be expanded to incorporate data from other periods, sources and location