"Counterpunch" is an absolutely brilliant book, built around a series of
brilliant insights. It describes punches far more sophisticated than what is
needed for punching down a background in wood carving, and techniques of
punchcutting that require more skill, so it might be a bit intimidating; but it
is also a great read on its own. And plenty of the information in it is
applicable.

Smeirs is a computer type designer and was trying to convince software engineers
that 250 d.p.i. wasn't enough resolution for a typeface. They, being engineers,
wanted numbers. So he started studying historic typographic punches and soon
found that there was no adequate description of how they were designed and made.
In his despair he turned to his father, an industrial metalworker trained when
Europe was rebuilding from WWII. He took his father to the Plantin-Moretus
Museum in Amsterdam, which holds hundreds of sets of punches, some from as far
back as the 16th century. "No one knows  how these were made," he told his
father.

His father laughed at him, said "I know a dozen men who could make these for
you," he said. "I could make them myself." Then he explained the whole process:
files, burins, steel, relief, counterpunches, striking, all still done by hand
in the old way in the 1950s. Where Junior had seen typographic punches, Senior
had just seen punches, just like the dies he had made for cutting out cigar
bands and other things.

And now Junior could get his numbers. He made a few punches, measured the curls
of steel that the graver took off. Curls that were enough to make the difference
between a good letter and an ugly letter. The curls were on the order of
1/100,000 of an inch thick. -That- gave him a number for those 250 d.p.i.
software engineers to chew on.


Once Smeijers was into making punches, he had the second epiphany the book comes
from: 16th-century type design was better explained by the use of counterpunches
than by using burins to dig out the counters (the white areas inside the
letters). This is one of those stunning-obvious realizations, an application of
the principal that the tools lead the design (which sounds deceptively like
"form follows function," but which is actually quite different). In woodworking
terms, you -can- make the same shapes with a belt sander and with hand planes;
but in practice you -don't-. The best part of Smeirs' book is spent in
explaining how counterpunches work and how they influenced the design.

Smeijrs' epiphany on counterpunching and type design is closely comparable to
Edward Catiche's "The Origin of the Serif," which describes his realization that
Roman inscriptional capitals were laid out by just writing them freehand with a
wide, flat brush. For five or six centuries people had been trying to copy them
with compass and straightedge, drawing the outlines according to increasingly
complex rules and then filling in. Its all very simple when you figure it out.
Another great read if your tastes lie toward letters.


Bugbear wrote:

> 
> I've found a 1911 book of drop stamping, including die-cutting,
> which has some relevant techniques:
> 
> "Drop Forging, Die Sinking and Machine Forming of Steel"
> 
> https://archive.org/stream/dropforgingdiesi00wooduoft#page/66/mode/2u
p">https://archive.org/stream/dropforgingdiesi00wooduoft#page/66/mode/2up

> 


I wish I'd had a copy of this book back when I was studying bookbinders'
finishing tool makers, this and the other books by the same author listed
opposite the title page. Binders' toolcutting didn't often provide a whole
living, so it was often done by more general firms. In city directories in the
18th and early 19th century these firms usually described themselves as "seal
engravers;" in the middle and late 19th century the description shifted to "die
sinkers."  But its hard to get solid information on either trade.

Tom Conroy