Rob Roy Kelly

Wood type collector and scholar. He wrote what is still the definitive work on American wood type.

The 2010 edition of American Wood Type lists him as having about 150 faces (not fonts) of wood type. His collection ultimately went to the Univ. of Texas at Austin, http://www.utexas.edu/cofa/rrk/index.php

Anyone interested in wood type needs to have Kelly's American Wood Type: 1828-1900 ("Notes on the Evolution of Decorated and Large Types and Comments on Related Trades of the Period.") It is still the finest work on the subject, and it is as necessary for wood type as McGrew's American Metal Typefaces of the Twentieth Century is for metal type. (Indeed, his discussions of type in general as often as pertinant to metal type as wood type, and few have made the stylistic distinctions between Nineteenth-Century ornamented faces as well as he has.)

Bibliography:

Kelly, Rob Roy. "American Wood Type." Design Quarterly, No. 56 Minneapolis, MN: Walker Arts Center, 1963.

Kelly, Rob Roy. American Wood Type: 1828-1900 ("Volume One") Limited Edition. NY: 1964.

Kelly, Rob Roy. "Wood Letters in the 20th Century." Matrix 7. Rochester, NY: Office of Educational Research, Rochester Institute of Technology, 1965.

This Matrix should not be confused with the Matrix published by the Whittington Press.

Kelly, Rob Roy. American Wood Type: 1828-1900 ("Notes on the Evolution of Decorated and Large Types and Comments on Related Trades of the Period.") First Edition. NY: Van Nostrand, 1969.

still in print as of 2010

Kelly, Rob Roy. American Wood Type: 1828-1900 ("Notes on the Evolution of Decorated and Large Types and Comments on Related Trades of the Period.") First Paperback Printing. NY: Da Capo Press, 1977.

Kelly, Rob Roy, ed. Wood Type Alphabets: 100 Fonts NY: Dover Publications, 1977.

Harris, Elizabeth M. The Fat and the Lean: American Wood Type in the 19th Century . Washington, DC: National Museum of American History / Smithsonian Institution, 1983.

Kelly, Rob Roy. American Wood Type: 1828-1900 ("Notes on the Evolution of Decorated and Large Types and Comments on Related Trades of the Period.") Second Paperback Printing. Saratoga, CA: Liber Apertus Press, 2010.

[ Kelly] Shields, David. "Considering Rob Roy Kelly's American Wood Type Collection." Printing History, New Series No. 7 (January, 2010): 21-36.