A few decades ago, Richard Rockford was about to buy some vintage wooden typefaces from an American antique dealer when the seller pulled open one last drawer. It was where he kept a shoebox-worth of non-English letters orphaned from their original alphabets, hoping someone might eventually adopt them. “He was like, ‘Oh and here’s some foreign type,’” remembers Rockford, a Buffalo-based found materials artist who turns old machinery scraps into sculptures. “He didn’t even know what it was.” But Rockford did. He’d been collecting it for years. There were curlicued…
