1. Around 1955 wood-type was dying out due to the prevalence of photo type and chromatography for letterpress purposes. Rob Roy Kelley went around to type shops to collect the wood types and so almost single-handedly saves the wood-type of America.
2. The manufacturers of wooden-type have custom saw finishing blades that leave marks completely unique to their plant upon the foot of their produced fonts. This helps identify fonts that had no mark inscribed on their first A, or as was the case later on, had it's sticker identifier fall off.
3. One of the main reasons behind the use of wood-type was that the larger the type size got in metal, the heavier it became. The typesetter back in the day employed children to put type back in it's original cases and the children could not lift the heavier/larger pieces. As well, metal when put through the process of creating a type block has a tendency to warp and become concave due to fractious cooling time.
4. The Rob Roy Kelley Collection is currently the largest public collection, with over 150 distinct faces.
5.The saying mind your P's and Q's came from the fact that children did put away the blocks, the p's and q's where very similar looking and shared fairly close proximity in the California cases type is stored in.
Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection, University of Texas at Austin
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