Some reader of this blog should go and do a more extensive photoshoot and writeup of the museum, nu?

There is a marvelous online (and previously real-world) exhibit on the history of the Jewish Book Trade that I thought may interest many of our community.

The exhibit, entitled "Printer, Publisher, Peddler: The Business of the Jewish Book," was produced by the University of Pennsylvania and curated by Arthur Kiron and can be viewed at www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/cajs/PrinterPublisherPeddler.

Judy Pinnolis forwarded this link to me months ago, for an Israeli site with information on early Hebrew newspapers. It's a wonderful browse! עיתונות עברית היסטורית Early Hebrew Newspapers. Note that instead of utf-8, the hebrew is encoded with windows-1252, so if you aren't using a windows machine, the hebrew may not be readable.

What Kosofsky did was to go back over the rich literature of Jewish handbooks from the Middle Ages: "The bestselling guide to Jewish life for more than three centures" on how to live a Jewish year, and put together a lovely amalgam, in English, and including a wealth of woodcut illustrations. This edition is inspired by the Yiddish language "Minhogimbukh", published in Venice, 1593.

As designer, author/translator, and typesetter, Kosofsky was able to create the sort of book that is a pleasure to hold and to look at, even before you begin to sink into the content. For Hebrew, he has chosen Vilna, a font that is truer to the type commonly used in these books, although not one that represents, in my mind, the best of Hebrew typography, then or now. I think we are past due for some revival faces based on those early Italian Hebrew fonts, or even the face, contemporaneous to the "Minhogimbukh" (but not used in it) by Le Bé, the French type designer who did, if I remember correctly, some early faces for Dutch and French printers.

Here is also a link to the NPR interview with Mr. Kosofsky from about a year ago (Sep 29, 2004) by Karen Grigsby Bates. It begins with an intro to Sukkoth.

My name is Harold Jacubowitz and as a ceramic artist I'm looking for Hebrew metal types that I could use to impress into clay.

Could you help me find some ?

I'm not going to put his e-mail address online for the spambots to glom onto, but if you know of sources for Harold, post them here (that would be fantastic, because then everyone with the same question would get an answer), or e-mail me and I'll pass it on.

First, I borrowed a set of huge wooden type letters from the National Yiddish Book Center. Big, major fun.

I haven't had time to breathe for months. There is a lot of neat stuff that should be noted here and isn't here yet. But I thought I'd mention an especially neat item that killed this afternoon.

Max and Minka have an amazing Yiddish decoder ring on their website (go to www.maxminka.com and click on "yiddish"). This is great for people who have the simplest possible computers and just want to get some decent Yiddish onboard. Unfortunately, to avoid encoding issues, Max made up a backwards, non-standard encoding. Great for one-time use; awkward for turning into a manuscript using commercial fonts.

And, as you'll see, I managed to get into big layout trouble, despite InDesign generally making this sort of work easier than any other tool I've ever used. (Yes, in part this means that tools for doing multi-lingual typography has generally sucked big-time.)

But, of course, no one wants to do that any more. And no one should have to: we have lots of tools for editing Hebrew, and Unicode fonts. So, this year, a bit late, as usual, I have redone that minimal Haggadah Toolkit and input the Hebrew using Unicode so that it =should= be possible to cut and paste into whatever tool works for you. Of course, by now, everyone has finished the Haggadah and just needs to print them up for the seder Saturday night, but just in case, the new version is now available. And better, it will still be there next year, maybe with a bit more Hebrew, as I have time.

Passover Haggadah Toolkit, v 0.2