Our story
Galley & Gunpowder is named for two rooms on a wooden warship, and for the tray a printer sets type in. The film tells it in thirty-five seconds; the chapters below take a little longer.
Read the film’s narration
Before they were shirts, they were ink on paper. In 1832 and 1889, American type foundries sold printers these engraved cuts: ships, cannons, coffee pots and creatures of the sea. We choose the originals, set them with period type and give each design one or two colours. From the specimen book to heavyweight cotton. Galley & Gunpowder. Keep your powder dry.
Two things that could sink her
A wooden warship carried two things that could sink her from the inside: fire and gunpowder. Keep them apart, keep your powder dry, and a ship could sail around the world.
The galley
The cook kept the fire in the galley, in an iron stove fenced in by rules, and fed the crew from it.
The powder
The powder lived in the magazine, below the waterline, behind a door no naked flame could pass. Before powder came in cartridges, gun crews loaded it into the barrel with a long-handled ladle.
Beat to quarters
When the drum beat to quarters, the crew ran to their guns and the powder came up from the magazine, a cartridge at a time, in boxes that kept it from sparks.
The other galley
In a print shop, a galley is also the tray that holds type once it has been set, and that is where our pictures come from. Nineteenth-century type foundries sold printers small engraved pictures, called cuts, each with its own number: cannons and powder horns, ships and steamboats, teapots, a monkey and a surprising number of fish.
The Font Revival project traced those cuts from scans of the original books, along with dozens of period typefaces, and released them under an open licence. We go through the books for the ones that belong at sea, set them with display type from the same decades, and give each design one or two colours, the way a jobbing printer would have.
Printed from the 1800s to today, now on heavyweight garment-dyed cotton.
Keep your powder dry.