Typesetting

Our allied trades are almost all linked to architecture, whether building or furnishing or repairing or decorating. Typesetting may seem well out of place. Doubtless it looks like the final addition to a string of obsessions relating to the Arts and Crafts movement. In fact, typesetting came first. When I first started a business of my own in 1989, it was typesetting. Taking advantage of the new computer desktop publishing revolution, I worked freelance for established publishers, such as Routledge, Ashgate and Edinburgh University Press. And soon I started my own publishing business, Cruithne Press. It is quite possible that my love of the craft of typesetting helped delude me that I was a craftsman.
   I am still happy to undertake typesetting commissions or design letterheads. For the Arts and Crafts enthusiast, we are limited in our choice of typefaces. Milton, Fairfax Station, Kelmscott (named, of course, after William Morris's own typeface designed for his publishing house, Kelmscott Press), a Bauhaus typeface, a standard Art Nouveau font, some dodgy pseudo-C. R. Mackintosh versions, and one named after Walter Crane. Others exist, but we haven't splashed out for them (an American Arts and Crafts font named after Dard Hunter, the graphics designer, is high on our wish list).
   Even more unlikely, I am willing to design simple websites. The result, like this one, will be quite home made. Although we have the capacity to do rather fancy things with your images. The good news, however, is that your site could be designed and hosted and working for a total sum of as little as £200.