125 years ago today – at exactly 12:05 in the afternoon, Berlin time – H. Berthold AG filed prints of 13 sizes of Akzidenz-Grotesk’s regular weight with the Berlin Muster-Register. That means that it is the typeface’s “birthday” right now. typeoff.de/2023/04/notes-…

Oh my, check out this fabulous-sounding workshop, happening next summer at @Tipoteca. It will be lead by Riccardo Olocco from @castfoundry and Bill Moran. Yeah, you read that right…Bill Moran! Don’t miss your opportunity to learn about letters in Italy. tipoteca.it/en/evento/tipo…

Logo for a Krefeld wallpaper and carpet something-or-other, drawn by Otto Eckmann and kept in his Teilnachlass at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Museum.

Tief im Westen muss man das Jahr dazu schreiben, weil die Wiedervereinigung sich nicht wirklich so sehr in den Erinnerungen gedrungen ist?

Brass pattern for engraving 12 matrices for one Berthold of typefaces.

@EvaSilvertant @astypefonts This is the Moderne Versalien, right? digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht?PP…

Well, was das angeht, bin ich super schuldig.

Some time ago, I was asked to contribute to the next _Marginalien_ issue, so I wrote an 18-page article in passable German on the changing professional environment for punchcutters in Germany between 1850 and 1900. All my favorite research libraries subscribe to this journal 🎉🎊

Here is a neat find: An 1893 postcard from the brass-type manufacturer Otto Kaestner in Krefeld to Schelter & Giesecke in Leipzig about an order from Bilbao.

Oh my goodness, at designkrefeld our students are having their first in-person big boom annual exhibition since 2019! I just finished helping affix students’ work from the last year. Only two people have come to visit me since I moved here. This weekend’s a perfect opportunity 😉

Every time someone in the German media moans about Abiturienten who don’t have to answer exam questions about Goethe’s Faust anymore and how that is the Untergang of civilization, I think of this image.

I’ve gotten a picture of Tom Baker as Doctor Who onto the @fontstand News website, so I can leave my editorship of it now and know I’ve done my best work! But seriously, attend the St Bride lecture on BBC graphics next week. It sounds great. I’ll be dialing in via Zoom.

This car will hopefully get me and four other people named Reynolds to The Hague before the @Fontstand Conference starts!

People of the Internet, who knows about the Deutsche Schrift-Industrie GmbH’s Depesi types? It said depesi was a substance that allowed for cheaper and longer-lasting products than wood type could offer. I only know that they exhibited their types at the BUGRA at Leipzig in 1914!

For years I trawled through poorly-OCR’d newspapers to find registration dates for H. Berthold AG’s design patents. In June, I came across a notebook recording the registration dates for more than 100 typefaces from the first third of the 20th century! typeoff.de/2022/08/bertho…

You know you are in the most old-school part of Germany when you are surrounded by this typeface combination. Rotis Sans and Frutiger Next! Please make it stop 😭

There’s likely only one specimen brochure from the Klinkhardt foundry for Hildegard Henning’s Belladonna typeface. I had @DNB_Aktuelles digitize it. Then I collated what I found out about Henning and Belladonna into a post, with a link to the specimen at typeoff.de/2022/08/hildeg…

I’m a massive dork. I also have Covid (again). Instead of being at Berlin’s Lange Nacht der Museen tomorrow to show off the Technikmuseum’s hieroglyph punches, I’m recuperating. This backup vid of me will be shown instead 😢 Go see the Theinhardt punches! youtube.com/watch?v=DMQ9y3…

Günter Gerhard Lange wanted Berthold to be better than Monotype (from Typografische Monatsblätter 2.2003). And from the 1960s into the early 1990s, it certainly was!

In June, we had a small conference on type specimens at the Deutsches Technikmuseum. Now I’ve typed up my introduction on using those specimens as sources for research. There’s lots more to say about digitization, but here’s a start: typeoff.de/2022/08/how-ol…

This drawer, from a cabinet that was once in the Reichsdruckerei, has about 100 hand-cut steel punches from Ferdinand Theinhardt. Less than a dozen people have seen it IRL since 1983, but you can come look at it next Saturday during @LNDMberlin (also with a big magnifying glass)

Years ago, I translated two articles for the excellent „Vom Buch auf die Straße: Große Schrift im öffentlichen Raum“. Now I have a copy of the museum exhibition poster hanging up, too. If you ever see a copy of this book, snap it up!

This finally arrived in the post today! I hope that it isn’t the first copy to arrive in Krefeld.

Hats off to whoever put the Bible onto this Düsseldorf bookstore‘s Sci-Fi/Fantasy shelf.

Alright, even I have to admit that the seven-letter ligature in one line of this poster lettering and eight-letter ligature in another are wicked-cool ideas.

Even the famous old dudes sometimes made mistakes. Here’s a note about the release of Berthold’s Lo-Schrift, falsely attributed by Friedrich Baier to Joe Loe instead of Louis Oppenheimer. From Klimsch’s Jahrbuch, vol. 15 (1915–1920).

@heterotype @kupfers @CEliason @klimtypefoundry Yes, antique as the word for sans serif in French is very. Certainly it was already in use by the mid-19th century. As just one example, here’s a French-language specimen sheet from Haas in Basel, printed in the 1860s (at the latest).

@hardwig @CEliason @klimtypefoundry He even made a chart (at the end of the article, on page 15):

@hardwig @CEliason @klimtypefoundry That just doesn’t seem quite right. I don’t think serifenlose Antiqua is a break at all. For instance, here is half a page from Zapf’s „Die Stillgruppen Der Antiqua und ihre charakteristischen Elemente“, printed in the 1953 Gutenberg-Jahrbuch:

The 5th interview in the Deutsches Technikmuseum’s living history series has just been published on YouTube. Tune in and listed to @espiekermann reminisce about the old H. Berthold AG. In German with English subtitles at youtu.be/jONDG4I6kAU

I’ve been looking at German brass-type specimens for about a year, and I think this is probably the first non-Latin-script example I’ve seen so far. But they must have made more. Especially for Cyrillic. Anyway: Otto Kaestner GmbH Krefeld, sometime between 1911 and 1920ish.

@rainerklute Yes on mobile

As many snapshots as my kids would let me make. Come visit the show (and me) sometime!

Does YOUR museum have an Otto-Eckmann-adjacent up and running? 10 points for Krefeld!

By the time Berthold got around to cutting and registering the Cyrillic characters for Garnitur 9011 in 1903, the famous typeface did have a name, as you can see here.

Nobody is ever going to believe this, but I am pretty certain that this unassuming-looking design-patent registration notice from 1902 (for an as yet unnamed “Grotesk Garnitur Nr. 9011”) is the design-patent registration Berthold filed for Royal-Grotesk.

For months, I’ve tween tweeting out links to various type specimens digitized in Berlin recently. Now you can read about that large 500+ item project in English on @Fontstand News. Includes images from @sbb_news, @galeriep98a, etc. fontstand.com/news/design-ne…

The Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin has just published a living-history interview with the lithographer and offset printer Dietmar Liebsch! It is in German, with English subtitles. It includes many details of life in East Berlin, too.
youtube.com/watch?v=ERO-sw…

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m happy to present you with the strangest-looking lowercase “g” ever cut for a sans serif font during the 19th century. Look at that everybody! That isn’t something you see very day. The rest of the letters (except maybe the “f”) are pretty normal now.

Dr. Dorothee Ader is the new director of the Klingspor Museum in Offenbach. Your Sunday assignment is to watch her new online 48-minute introduction to Rudolf Koch and the museum in English! youtu.be/HCpMYO_Sgrg

@ArrowType I really like the optical size slider on this micro site. The difference between “size masters” in blackletter type has long been visible in a way that maybe wasn’t as direct in other styles. See also this example comparing two early-20th-century designs:

The German Patent office used Star Wars Day last Wednesday to teach German social media about how franchises protect their properties. This was rather neat!

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Offenbach’s football squad had a player named Rudolf Koch.

Also in that 1981 Baseline issue I mentioned yesterday is a piece about Ikarus. The image for width interpolation shows Albert Kapr’s Leipziger Antiqua. Wasn’t 1981 a few years before Typoart began having URW digitize its fonts??!?

This is a great photo of Veronika Elsner and Freda Sack making digital type, taken either in 1980 or 1981. From a 1981 German-language edition of Baseline.

Folks in – or anywhere near – Germany: Please find a day in the next four weeks to make the pilgrimage to Offenbach to see the Beyond the Archive: Von der Gießerei zum Klingspor Type Archive exhibition before it closes. You won’t regret having made the trip!

Poster-sized specimen for Otto Kaestner’s brass types and ornaments, printed in Krefeld around 1896 and preserved since then in Cologne. Lots of neat fonts, including designs from the Rudhard and Reinhold foundries (later: Gebr. Klingspor and H. Berthold AG).

Wait. Was this normal? Gebr. Klingspor had a wood-type pantograph that engraved three copies of a pattern at once. (Snapshot of the exhibition catalog from Beyond the Archive: Von der Gießerei zum Klingspor Type Archive.)

Ever wonder what the photo-typesetting era was like? There’s a new 37-minute interview with Alexander Nagel (German with English subtitles), whose career in it was fascinating. See it & read a great introduction to it (with links) on @Fontstand News! fontstand.com/news/essays/in…