The Rob Roy Kelly Wood Type Collection is a comprehensive collection of wood type manufactured and used for printing in America during the nineteenth century. It is comprised of nearly 150 faces of various sizes and styles, including examples of the most popular printing types in use between 1828 and 1900, and represents a period of history marked by a rapid transition to new printing technologies. This change precipitated a radical shift away from traditional hand production—which involved creating type with soft calligraphic forms—to a completely industrialized manufacturing process—which produced type constructed with hard angular forms that reflect mechanical origins.

The noted design educator, collector, and historian Rob Roy Kelly (1925–2004) collected wood type from local printers for use by his students at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design. He began gathering the types in the late 1950s and continued adding to the collection over the next decade. He started researching the history, manufacture, and use of the growing collection partly in response to questions that arose from working with his students. His research was first published in the 1963 issue of Design Quarterly (No. 56), and was followed in 1964 by a limited-edition folio of specimen sheets from the collection, entitled American Wood Types 1828–1900, Volume One. Kelly’s research would culminate with the publishing in 1969 of the seminal American Wood Type, 1828–1900: Notes on the Evolution of Decorated and Large Types and Comments on Related Trades of the Period. American Wood Type was later reprinted as a paperback in 1977. This text was one of the first, and remains one of the most comprehensive, histories of American vernacular printing types of the period. During the 1970s, the publication of Kelly’s American Wood Type helped fuel a revival of interest in nineteenth-century American printing types, and in doing so, helped save a valuable facet of American history.

In early 1966, unable to maintain the unwieldy assortment of wood types he had gathered, Kelly sold the collection to Dr. Bernard Karpel, head librarian of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Later that year, Dr. Karpel sold the collection to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRC) at The University of Texas at Austin. Through the work and guidance of Richard Oram, at the HRC, and Gloria Lee, then Assistant Professor of Design at The University of Texas at Austin, the collection was transferred to the care of the Design Division of the Department of Art and Art History, College of Fine Arts, in 1993.

Kelly’s final work with the Collection came in the early 1990s when he was asked by Adobe Systems to participate in a project to develop digital revivals of historic wood types as part of the Adobe Originals program. As consultant to the project, Kelly helped select, from his own collected materials, the type styles that would be made into digital fonts.