W. Russell Hood collection related to typography and graphic design

The W. Russell Hood Collection related to Typography and Graphic Design is a working reference file of original and reproductive lettering and design from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, as well as articles and clippings on typography and design spanning the dates 1950-1969. The files were created by W. Russell Hood, a Philadelphia-based industrial designer.

The collection is still valuable to researchers as a source of lettering and imagery, especially the popular labels and logos of Series I.1., the ornate engravings and script exercises in Series I.3., and finally the Modern imagery of the 1950s and 1960s available in Series II.

The collection is organized in three series: Series I. Visual Reference Material, Series II. Reference Articles, and Series III. Original work. Most of the material is housed in either subject files or in notebooks, as originally arranged by Hood according to style or subject of the image.

Series I contains specimens of lettering, printing ornaments, typography, and graphic design. Hood gathered his visual references from original texts as well as reproductions from publications and commercial ephemera of the 1960s.

Of particular historic interest are a number of borders and script exercises from early printed penmanship texts, including a grouping identified as “Perret, Antwerp, 1569” and John Ayres’ A Tutor to penmanship, or, the writing master … (1698?). Several large notebooks include elements of commercial design in the form of clippings from various advertisements, letterhead, seals, and packaging from the 1960s. Hood often gathered material from consumables including candy wrappers, labels from food packaging, bottles of liquor and wine, and mailing labels. One notebook contains a series of tracings which Hood made from a text on watermarks. The pages are headed with the title “Filigranes sur papiers d’Imprimés Vénitiens.”

Series II consists wholly of over 200 articles on typography and design written in the 1950s and 1960s. There is a series of biographical articles on various typographers and letterers, including Hermann Zapf, Eric Gill, and Will Carter.

A small group of original designs form Series III. Included are Hood’s own studies of lettering and designs for bookplates and decorative lids, and four designs by Dr. A. Süheyl Ünver.