Movable Feast

#tk warning! This page is a work in progress; the database interface is not yet available for public viewing.

A Movable Feast is a digital humanities project providing public interfaces to a relational database of physical letterpress items, with a focus on the Virginia Book Arts’ large collection of movable type. The project builds on the VBA printshop’s “what type do we have & where can I find it?” list toward adding & improving

  • photos of all our type (and aspirationally, photos of all our type being composed, and photos of prints made with all our type, to help printers easily see what might work for their intended project)
  • type description (e.g. letting you filter to see just all the italic 36pt lead type we have)
  • history (both of typefaces in general, and of this specific type’s acquisition and use by VBA’s community)
  • evaluative info (e.g. how full is the case? what foundry made it? how well does it print?)

Virginia Book Arts!

“Virginia Book Arts”/VBA is the current member-run, non-profit version of a 30+ year organization, taking over from its last home at the Virginia Center for the Book’s Book Arts Program (which ended after defunding in Summer 2025). VBA recently secured a new physical space and became a non-profit under the fiscal sponsorship of Richmond’s excellent Studio Two Three—you can read more on VBA’s new website, Instagram or Bluesky accounts, or especially by joining VBA’s listserv to hear first when the space opens to the public, restarts offering workshops and community events, etc. (scroll to fill out form at bottom of vabookarts.org.

Credits

Amanda Wyatt Visconti and Josef Beery captured photos of every open typecase, a top-down view of all the type in the collection, during a short-notice period when it looked like the type would leave Charlottesville. Descriptive, evaluative, and historical details for the type are also included, built on inventory creation and maintenance work by Kevin McFadden, Garrett Queen, Kristin Adolfson, Josef Beery, Amanda Wyatt Visconti, Richard Cappuccio, and other past and present VBA members.

If you’ve used VBA’s type, you can help!

We are currently working to add more information about the local history of acquisition & notable uses of each typeface in VBA’s collection. Please contact me (visconti at virginia dot edu) if you have any:

  1. Memory of what specific VBA typeface was used in notable past VBA work such as a visiting artist project, member collaboration, etc. (Typeface name & variant, or case number; if known, point/pica size is very helpful as it lets us show how a specific case of type’s been used, and what size appears in any associated photos of composed type or printed work.)
  2. Photos of composed VBA type (can be at any stage of typesetting, lockup, etc.)
  3. Photos of prints showing use of specific type in VBA’s collection For #2 and #3, it’s especially helpful if you can share either the typeface & variant pictured, or case number; point/pica size is terrific if you’re certain what it was! (If you don’t have those details, photos are still useful as we can sleuth these details later.) We are only interested in things made with VBA’s own specific type, not things made with non-VBA type that has the same typeface/etc as VBA owns.

A note on puns & spelling variants

The project name plays on Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast memoir title, which refers to some religious observances that occur on different dates on different years.

Partway through taking photos of the typecase, I started to also take a closeup photo of one example sort. I wanted something visible even with smaller type, so I decide to always use a lowercase “m” sort—and the “mmmmm” resulting photos go nicely with the “feast” idea.

Hemingway uses the “moveable” spelling with an “e”, but the term “movable type” tends to use the also-correct E-less spelling; as this project focuses on letterpress work, I chose to title it using the spelling most used for letterpress rather than matching Hemingway’s title.