Daniel Schneider, Industrial Archeologist

Daniel Schneider (Instagram: rustedrebar) is a letterpress printer with an undergraduate degree in journalism and a master’s in industrial archeology, a field I am dying to talk to him about. His research has centered on the transformation of nineteenth century artisanal skills within the context of industrialization. He is the Headquarters Manager for the Society for Industrial Archeology at the Michigan Technological University, which is where he earned his master’s.

We discussed his master’s work “excavating” the function of a wood-border stamping machine at the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum and, more generally, how we retain and recover industrial knowledge to understand how things worked in the past. Daniel’s work considers the worker’s role in industrial production, considering the transition of work from craft to repetitive low-skill production.

Notes on this episode:

“Worker Skill in the Industrial Production of Decorative Wood Type Borders”

The Museum of Jurassic Technology

Memory as an aberration in nature: “Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter”

The Tiny Typecase episode with Jim Moran, Master Printer and Collections Officer at the Hamilton Museum

The episode with David Shields, chair of the Department of Graphic Design at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond

Louis John Pouchée’s remarkable stereotyped large ornamental capitals

William H. Page, a major wood-type maker bought out (as most were) by Hamilton

The Barth type caster

Rob Roy Kelly’s American Wood Type (reproduction edition produced by David Shields)

Lake copper district in Keweenaw Peninsula

Steam-stamp mill

Monotype Hot-Metal Ltd., part of The Type Archive in London

Theo Rehak and his now-rare book Practical Typecasting

American Type Founders

Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises

History of the Hitchcock Chair Company

The Hitchcock Chair: the Story of a Connecticut Yankee (1971) by John Tarrant Kenney, who rebuilt the Hitchcock factory and resumed production over a century later

Ancient knapped flint tools created by early hominids

Movie about Andy Goldsworthy, Rivers and Tides