Invoice from a hauling company in Nürnberg-Erlenstegen, issued in July 1920 to Herrn Göselt, a local merchant (Kaufmann dahier) for carting six stere (Steer) of wood for Zeltner — possibly the local brewery of the same name?

The typography uses both weights of Mars, a so-called neudeutsche Schrift from the Jugendstil period that brings together elements of blackletter and roman type. Designed by Albert Auspurg, Mars and its bold companion were issued by the A.-G. für Schriftgießerei und Maschinenbau in Offenbach in 1906 and 1909, respectively.

In 1939, Georg Kalb had a tragic accident and crashed his wagon into the Pegnitz river. After his death, his brother — who, oddly enough, was named Georg as well — continued the hauling business. Georg Kalb (1870–1941), who may have been this brother or yet another family member with the same name, was the landlord of the Kalbsgarten. This popular countryside inn existed until 1969, see a picture from 1911 and the address on Google Street View.

Summe is an exhibition by various independent art spaces from the Basel area, Switzerland. Initiated and organized by the art space Dr. Kuckucks Labrador, it has been held annually since 2015. The edition of 2017 is dedicated to the medium video.
The corporate design is based on a playful reference of the Greek letter Sigma (Σ), meaning sum, and was designed by Haus Kato.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

This week’s invoice is a perfect example for what we collect under the “one typeface” tag: a use that is exclusively set in a single typeface. Most vintage invoice designs exhibit a mix of two or more typefaces, for better or worse, and even the few that are restricted to a single typeface family show at least a second weight. This one is different. All of the type on it is the original fett style of Deutsche Schrift, the first typeface by Rudolf Koch, released in 1910 by Gebr. Klingspor and also known as Kochschrift.

It’s not one font, though. In metal type, a font is a given style at a specific size. Six sizes and hence six fonts were used to typeset this document. Between the sizes, there are some remarkable differences in the design of certain letters. For example, the bowl of R is closed in the larger sizes, but open in the smaller ones, see the detail image below. Different counter treatment and suppression and emphasis of features are two of the principles guiding the design of optical sizes as described by Shoko Mugikura and Tim Ahrens in their essential book Size-specific adjustments to type designs.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

The a in Deutsche Schrift fett is particularly interesting. Its optical sizes bridge the borders of blackletter classification. In larger sizes, it has straight sides, as in a textura (see “Holzpantinen”). However, in sizes of 10pt and below, its left side is curved, as in a schwabacher (see “Bankkonto”) — and as in all sizes of the lighter weights of the family (the condensed has a double-storey ‘a’ with straight sides). Alter Littera’s single size digitization includes both shapes.

Despite the typographic restraint, the final invoice still hosts a motley crew of letterforms. In addition to the handwriting in roundhand and kurrent (“Frachtſtempel”), there are miscellaneous stamps. I’m fond of the ones with the Ronde script (“Waaren-Conto”, “angewiesen”).

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Friedrich Rumpfkeil & Sons was a manufacturer of clogs and galoshes with a leather finishing shop in Groß-Berkel, nowadays part of the municipality Aerzen in the Hamelin-Pyrmont district, Lower Saxony. This invoice is not for shoes, but rather for 50 kg of floor lacquer in various colors. The recipient is the “Cons(um)-Anstalt von Hoffmanns Stärke”, a company-owned shop founded in 1879 to supply the 1,000 employees of Hoffmann’s Stärkefabriken in Salzuflen with all kinds of consumer goods on-site.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: All Rights Reserved.

The first vintage invoice I’ve posted here featured a combination of sans serif and blackletter — “German” letterforms for the company’s name, “Latin” ones for everything else. In this one, it is the opposite way around. This formula — Fraktur as default, with proper names of persons or locations distinguished by the use of Antiqua (i.e. roman, incl. sans serif*) — was in fact the convention for German texts for centuries.

*) The term for sans serifs as defined in the German DIN classification is actually Serifenlose Linear-Antiqua (“serifless linear roman”), clearly labeling them as a subgroup of romans.

“H. NIEHAUS, HASSEL” is set in a typeface that today is best known under its export name, Phosphor. In Germany, it was generically named Lichte fette Grotesk (“Open bold sans serif”). Designed by Jakob Erbar and released in 1923, it is the harbinger of the Erbar-Grotesk series (1926–30). With its “instant logo” qualities, the all-caps inline face enjoyed great popularity — Lichte fette Grotesk can be found on many invoices from this era. This commercial success caused Ludwig & Mayer to add several related styles (Lucina, Lumina, Lux), and other foundries to follow up with similar releases, see e.g. Helios (1928), Elegant-Grotesk licht (1929), Friedrich-Bauer-Grotesk licht (1933), or Kristall-Grotesk lichtfett (1938). Lichte fette Grotesk came with a few alternates. Both forms of ‘S’ have been used here.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: All Rights Reserved.

The other faces constitute a random mix with too many uncoordinated ingredients, likely determined primarily by what the local printshop had in their type drawers. There’s Rudolf Koch’s Deutsche Schrift, in fett (“Rechnung”, “Eigenes Erzeugnis …”) and schmal (items). Potsdam schmalhalbfett makes an appearance, too (“für Herrn Gastwirt”). The rest is set in two weights and various sizes of Kleukens-Fraktur, with the smallest sizes added from one of the countless standard frakturs, see Normal-Fraktur. The initials (“H.N.”) might be in Kabel fett, but that’s hard to tell from two caps only. The way the arms of the ‘E’ are sheared suggests that “BEI BASSUM” is in Venus Extended.

Metal fonts typically didn’t include special characters like the percent sign (%) or currency symbols (ℛℳ) in a matching design. These were inserted from a separate case that held miscellaneous catch-all sorts.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: All Rights Reserved.

Typography aside, the date — just a few weeks before Operation Overlord began, yet still a full year before this area south of Bremen was captured by Allied troops — and the manually added item “Kriegszuschlag” (war surcharge) remind us of the circumstances this distillery invoice was issued, and make me wonder what kind of sorrows were drowned with these 120 bottles of corn brandy. The buyer, Erich Eschenhorst from Nordholz, didn’t live to see the end of the war.

Posted on the occasion of the release of CJ Dunn’s Dunbar, a contemporary interpretation of Jakob Erbar’s eponymous grotesk (Ludwig & Mayer, 1926). Make sure to read Indra’s accompanying article about early geometric sans serifs, and Stephen’s introduction to CJ Type.

Erbar-Grotesk here appears in its “natural habitat” — used as a workhorse typeface on a German invoice from the second quarter of the 20th century.

H(einri)ch Wuhrmann was a large-scale print shop in Freiburg/Breisgau, specializing in carbon (?) copy books for business and accounting. The company is still in existence, now as Wuhrmann Druck & Service GmbH.

The gotisch used for the header is Jochheim Deutsch, released in 1934 by Wilhelm Woellmer. Such a combination of a blackletter and a geometric sans serif may seem incongruous today, but it’s in fact quite typical for the mid 1930s/1940s. Jochheim Deutsch, although less stripped and linearized than Element & Co., belongs to the same wave of simplified texturas that were marketed — with nationalistic wording and imagery, in the case of Jochheim Deutsch with oak — as a modernization of the genre, and often shown side by side with faces like Futura in ads and specimens.