A series of six stamps issued by PostNord, the Swedish Postal Service in March 2016, with “mat i Sverige” (food in Sweden) as a theme. The typography is by Gustav Mårtensson, who has been a designer for the stamps of the Swedish Post Office for many years. As previously shown on Fonts In Use, Mårtenson has a soft spot for using type by Letters from Sweden, and this series is no exception. This time, the stamps show Trim, a sturdy sans with flat sides in all characters. Shortly after this series of stamps, the foundry added another flat sided sans to their collection: Mikro.

The (custom?) typeface used for small print with information is yet unidentified. It shows (semi)serifs on characters like P and L, and a distinct N with a diagonal that lands halfway the letter’s second vertical.

The illustrations are the star of the show, and were made by Veronica Ballart Lilja. Each stamp depicts various types of food that can be enjoyed in Sweden. Most stamps depict traditional food – just not traditional Swedish foods. There is pasta from Italy, Japanese sushi, there are Mexican tacos, and burgers form the US; shish kebab from the middle east and a selection of Nordic food: herring, potatoes, crisp bread, cheese, chives and egg.

First day cover with stamp and stamps

For the series about domestic saltwater fish species, stamp designer Gustav Mårtensson again picked a typeface based on a local vernacular source (see also the Per Anders Fogelström stamps). This time it’s Ferry (2014), the second release in Letters from Sweden’s “Fabrik Suite”.

The debut typeface of Erik Moberg is based on the anonymous lettering that adorns the vintage ferries crossing Stockholms ström, see Nos 1, 2, and 3. According to the information on the website of Rederi Stockholms Ström, the boats got their current names rather recently, but the lettering style with a bold wide sans serif is older, see this postcard from 1948.

Almost 200 species of fish have been identified living in salt or brackish water along the coast of Sweden. Some of them are uncommon while others are abundant. Fish come in a wide variety of shapes and colors and have widely varying lifestyles. What all the species in this series, and many other marine fish, have in common is that they all look after their eggs in some way and it is the male that guards the eggs. The coil stamp shows the relatively common Three-spined stickleback. The coil is part of the joint Nordic series where all eight Nordic postal agencies are issuing a stamp on the same theme. The booklet features Cuckoo wrasse, Lumpfish, Two-spotted goby, Rocket gunnel and Short-spired sea scorpion. — PostNord

The drawings for the stamps were made by Lars Sjööblom, based on photography by Anders Salesjö. I doubt that all the depicted fish species live underneath the ferries in the Strömmen, but Ferry’s certainly a nicely topical choice. Furthermore, it’s a good example that type on stamps doesn’t have to be small and shy. Well done, Gustav Mårtensson!

The coil stamp features the Three-spined stickleback. Gotham is used for the species’ name.

The First Day Cover (förstadagsbrev in Swedish) shows Ferry with alternating glyph colors.

This stamp series was issued by PostNord Sweden on the occasion of the centennial of Per Anders Fogelström (1917–1998):

[Fogelström] debuted as an author in the 1940s and is most known for his five-volume series about the working class and impoverished in Stockholm. You could say he became their voice. The first novel in the series, Mina drömmars stad (City of My Dreams), was published in 1960. The stamp motifs are inspired by this novel.

The five landmarks depicted on the stamps are Katarinahissen, Hammarby sjö (two variants), Barnängens fabrik, Kornhamnstorg, and Stigbergsgatan. The stamps were designed by Gustav Mårtensson, using photos from the Stockholm City Museum and the Lennart Börjesson Collection.

For the typeface, Mårtensson went with Kumla, an idiosyncratic caps-only face made by Göran Söderström and issued with Letters from Sweden in 2013. The design is inspired by the letters on the facade of Kumla Skofabrik, a shoe factory in a small town west of Stockholm. The sign was first documented in 1920 (or 1916?), in the period that is covered by the third volume of Fogelström’ series, Minns du den stad.

Blending Art Nouveau naïvety with industrial rigidness, Kumla’s letterforms also work well for evoking earlier decades. For the titles of the five novels on the First Day Cover, they were slanted and set on an angle. In addition, they were considerably stretched, turning the wide monolinear Kumla into a narrow face with horizontal stress. What would look amateurish and ugly in most other cases here looks convincingly vintage.

Souvenir sheet with a portrait of Fogelström.

Gustav Mårtensson, the designer of the stamps, explaining how the typefaces were selected by their importance to Swedish typographical history and their ability to represent the graphic expression of their time.

A new series of five stamps have recently been issued in Sweden, each portraying one influencial Swedish typeface to reflect the local typographic history. The five typefaces chosen were Berling (1951) by Karl-Erik Forsberg*, Indigo (1999) by Johan Ström, Sispos/Bosis (1973) by Bo Berndal, Satura (2010) by Göran Söderström, Peter Bruhn; and Traffic (1973) by Tom Hultgren.

*The digital version of Berling Antiqua is Berling Nova (2004) by Örjan Nordling and Fredrik Andersson.

Satura is representative of the new wave of Swedish fonts that are being drawn with digital tools and sold over the Internet.