I’ve had my personal blog since 2020 (thanks to pal @henry helping out) and I’ve kept track of my writing stats each year in a spreadsheet (because I’m a nerd).
It’s less about how many posts or words I write, and more about making sure that I am posting no matter work/life/kids/family obligations — which isn’t easy.
So here is a 🧵 of my 2025 posts, which you may enjoy reading as your wrap up your year.
(1/5)
Published in April, I wrote about finding Ottmar Mergenthaler’s death certificate so I could clarify his cause of death, at the young age of 46 years old.
Mergenthaler fits in the pantheon of late-19th-century inventors such as the exceptionally-racist Henry Ford, Henry Firestone, Levi Strauss, Alexander Graham Bell, Nikola Tesla, and the exceptionally-petty Thomas Edison, but yet I bet you’ve never heard of him: https://realdougwilson.com/writing/in-search-of-a-death-certificate
(2/5)
My next post was not until October; but was a culmination of six months of work digitizing, preserving, and uploading vintage printing and typography films.
One of the things I am most proud of this year is adding to a side-project which has been running for over a decade: https://realdougwilson.com/writing/new-additions-to-printing-films-archive
(3/5)
The beauty of having your own blog is you can write as much or as little as you want and you don’t have to care about clicks.
In November, I updated a post about a mysterious printing code that was officially confirmed during research for my Linotype book: https://realdougwilson.com/writing/cracking-the-linotype-printing-code
(4/5)
And just a few weeks ago, I published about the biggest article I’ve ever written about typography on the biggest typeface release of the past 25 years: GOTHAM.
The Gotham article (on @frerejonestype’s site) was three years in the making and is the definitive story on how Gotham was created and why it is the way it is; based on the designer behind the typeface.
I added to my blog a bit of info and a timeline that didn’t make it into the final post, because I thought it was important for future researchers: https://realdougwilson.com/writing/writing-about-gotham
(5/5)
Doug Wilson
