Speaker at Typecon in Portland

Join me and other 35 speakers for the best type conference on the West coast!
In case you missed my talk at Stanford earlier this year, here’s another chance to catch it—and to chat about how I organize my research. I’m thrilled to be back at TypeCon, especially since this talk was inspired by a fantastic presentation Paul Shaw gave last year on his approach to historical research.

This time, I’ll be sharing insights from over a decade of work on 19th-century Italian type, but with a focus on methodology: type historians don’t talk enough about how start a research, or how to organize and structure our materials along the way. 

More than showing the results, I would focus on the process of finding primary sources and retrieving information from type specimens, magazines, newspaper articles, local registries. Where do you start if you don’t know what to look for? How do you find primary sources? What is available online? How do you access libraries and private archives? How do you build a database to keep track of information? 

I started my research in 2005 with the aim of filling a gap in Italian type history: not much was known about the hundred years between the death of Bodoni, the famous printer and punchcutter from Parma in 1813, and the raise of Nebiolo type foundry. Starting from a list of specimens given to me by my dissertation advisor, I have been tracking the resources that did not get lost. The project expanded to map the type foundries active in Italy, their production, and the evolution of the local type founding industry, that experienced the transition of mechanization during the Industrial Revolution.

Researching Italian type history: on analog and digital archives, and a scrappy database 

Typecon 2025
August 7–9, 2025
Revolution Hall, Portland OR