Double Dagger Issue 2

Double Dagger is a 16pp broadsheet printed by letterpress on a Heidelberg SBB Cylinder Press using type that has been machine set on a Monotype Composition Caster.

“Justus Walbaum, a clergyman’s son from Steinlah, was apprenticed as a boy at the Konditorei where he learned to engrave pastry patterns into wood. Justus transferred this skill to letter-cutting and on setting up his type foundry in 1796 he began making typefounders’ matrices and tools…”. So begins issue 2 of Double Dagger whose pages are adorned with Monotype’s faithful interpretation of Justus Walbaum’s letters, in both the regular (series 374) and the bold (series 375).

Some highlights off issue 2 include an interview with Kiva Stimac, which is illustrated with two linocuts she produced for Wolf Eyes and Moor Mother gigs at her Popolo Press in Montréal. Spike of the Walden Press has also cut a lino for us — his Thompson Gem platen named Harold whilst Thomas Mayo talks us through the making of a Hexagonal wood type project he recently undertook and John Craig has cut his Venice typeface into lino alongside notes on the difficulties of doing so.

The centrefold is awash with black . . . Stanley Donwood’s The Contagion of New Troy accompanies his article, The Culture of Entitlement and Edwin Pickstone writes on the nature of the book in the on demand society. We finish with a letter from a Mr Paul Kershaw railing against our dismissal of the polymer plate printer who we dismissed as the anti-hero in issue 1.