In March 1996 TassinariVetta took over the art direction of Casabella, the historic architectural review founded in 1928. From that moment on the magazine has become part of the everyday life of the studio, where it is designed month after month.

Aiming to go beyond the traditional concept of ‘typographic architecture’ – which sees graphic arts subject to the universal compositional rules expressed in architecture – and to offer a new perspective on the world of letters, the 2024-25 cover design sets editorial objectives ahead of graphic ones.

Taking advantage of the constraints inherent in monthly publication in sectoralization and serialization, and enhancing repetitive elements—the masthead, headlines, but above all the sequential number—the project brings editorial content to the cover through the choice of the font used to compose the number, its graphic interpretation, and the explanatory note published on the inside pages, which is an integral part of the project itself.

Faithful to the magazine tradition, issue after issue, the choice of lettering or typeface moves through the 20th century between avant-garde and modernism, with forays into adjacent spaces suggested by unlikely discards or ambiguous analogies, while exploring the development of the industrial means underlying mechanical writing.

With philological respect—using fonts available under license, photographic reproductions of original specimens, or vector redrawing, as appropriate—and with the calibrated use of a color palette consistent with the magazine visual history, the graphic interpretation ultimately aims to bring the historical artifact into the present, contextualizing it in a contemporary and accessible language.

no. 976 – Lettering for the Tomba Veritti (Udine, Italy), Carlo Scarpa, 1951

no. 975 – Univers, Adrian Frutiger, Deberny & Peignot, 1957

no. 974 – Prisma, Rudolf Koch, Klingspor, 1930

no. 973 – LL Le Corbusier, Nico Schweizer (da Le Corbusier), Lineto, 1999

no. 971-972 – Memphis, Rudolf Wolf, Stempel AG, 1929

no. 970 – Ingenieur, Wim Crouwel, 1964, The Foundry Types, 2012

no. 969 – bayer-type, Hebert Bayer, Berthold, 1931

no. 968 – Mexico 68, Lance Wyman, 1966–68

no. 967 – Our Bodoni, Massimo Vignelli, Tom Carnase, WTC (World Typeface Center), 1989

no. 965-966 – Futura Black / Paul Renner / Bauer, 1929

no. 963 – Fat Face, Herb Lubalin, Tom Carnase, ITC International Typeface Corporation, 1970

no. 962 – Kabel, Rudolf Koch, Klingspor, 1927

no. 961 – Stop, Aldo Novarese, Nebiolo, 1970

no 959-960 – New Alphabet, Wim Crouwel, 1967

no. 958 – Frankfurter, Bob Newman, Letraset, 1970

no. 957 – Universal, Herbert Bayer, 1925

no. 956 – Oakland, Zuzana Licko, Emigre, 1985

no. 955 – Aldina (Aldino), Nebiolo, redesign Adalberto Libera, 1938

no. 954 – Kombinationsschrift, Josef Albers, 1926–28

no. 953 – Bifur, A.M. Cassandre, Deberny & Peignot, 1929

Ojārs Ābols (1922–1983) was a Latvian avant-garde artist of the 1960s and 1970s whose work reflected the political realities of the Soviet period. His contact with Western art led him away from socialist realism towards abstract modernism, despite being branded a “formalist” during a 1963-64 crackdown on non-conformist art. Until 10 May 2026, the Latvian National Museum of Art is showing a retrospective titled Ojārs Ābols. Cilvēka absurdie projekti uz Zemes / Ojārs Ābols. Man’s Absurd Projects on Earth.

For titles, the design uses Handel Gothic, a geometric typeface of the same era, to evoke both the period and the Modernist aesthetic that defined the artist's output. Text is set in Mulish.

Source: chroniclingamerica.loc.gov US Library of Congress: “Chronicling America”. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: chroniclingamerica.loc.gov US Library of Congress: “Chronicling America”. License: All Rights Reserved.

This ad in The Salt Lake Herald., April 18, 1880, demonstrates the ingenuity of late nineteenth-century typographers. Given the cost of producing and printing engravings, newspaper ads rarely used illustrations at that time. So companies sometimes turned to type to draw attention and express themselves. This layout evokes rug patterns and borders as if seen from overhead in a floor plan, grabbing the eye on an otherwise dense page.

The designer put three very different typeface styles to use: The “Carpets.” at top and bottom appear to match MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan’s four-line pica Gothic, No. 3, a style we list as Grotesque No. 5 / 396–399. (The word at the top may use a C from a different font.) Meanwhile, the light and narrow Condensed No. 3 contrasts nicely with the extra broad and bold Title Extended. All of these typefaces were likely created within a couple decades before this printing. They originated at German or Eastern U.S. foundries and made their way across the country to Salt Lake City in time to show up in service of the Walker Brothers Carpet company.

Drawing inspiration from the archives of philosopher Walter Benjamin, Zeena Parkins leads an extraordinary ensemble of experimental and avant-garde musicians – including William Winant, Tony Buck, Magda Mayas, and Joan La Barbara – in two intricate multi-part compositions that weave acoustic and electronic textures through improv, experimental, and contemporary forms.

Images and concept by Christian Philipp Mueller, with graphic design by gebr.silvestri The text on the cover and interior is set in GS_Valerie, designed by gear.silvestri in 2021.

[More info on Discogs]

Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center hosted an exhibition celebrating the work of Lyubov Popoba as well as her colleagues, teachers, and fellow thinkers in the Russian-Soviet avant-garde scene. The names of the exhibition sections, labels, and reference texts are set in Stratos by Production Type and Kazimir by CSTM Fonts. The exhibition has been designed by by Nadya Korbut, Kirill Ass, and Mikhail Mikadze together with ABC Design Studio.

Brought together within a European avant-garde network, the "model collection" of the Swiss-German book and type designer Jan Tschichold in the holdings of the Library of Design Basel contains around 1,500 small-format prints. It includes famous designers from the Bauhaus environment such as László Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer, as well as artists such as Kurt Schwitters and El Lissitzky – all pioneers of modern graphic design. This publication documents the complete collection and makes it possible for the first time to study the originals, which make the spirit of optimism of that era tangible and which are usually only depicted in black and white or in heavily altered colors in Tschichold’s books. This broadens the view of a network of 45 designers and a chapter of the European avant-garde that directly influenced the “Swiss Style” of the post-war period.

The book was edited by Patrick Rössler and Mirjam Brodbeck, designed by icona basel, and published by Wallstein Verlag.

The concrete poem “Uri Tsvi farn tseylem, INRI” (“אורי צבֿי פֿאַרן צלם„; “Uri-Zvi Before the Cross”), written by Uri-Zvi Greenberg (1896–1981), was featured in the second issue of the short-lived Yiddish literary journal Albatros (1922–1923), which was dedicated to expressionist and avant-garde aesthetics. The journal published its first two issues in Warsaw, eventually publishing the final third in Berlin due to censorship from Polish authorities. The text, shaped like Jesus’ crucifix and labeled with the Latin “INRI” (“Iēsūs Nāzarēnus Rēx Iūdaeōrum;” “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”), was deemed anti-Christian due to its content, which situated Jesus as a selfish martyr and a traitor to the Jews.

Both the title in Yiddish and the poem’s text are set in Frank-Rühl (פרנק-ריהל), the first modern Hebrew typeface, designed by Rafael Frank (1867–1920) and originally issued between 1908 and 1910 by the type foundry C.F. Rühl in Leipzig. The Latin capitals used for “INRI” are unidentified.

Folded leaflet for the research project Learning from Loheland exhibited at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg:

The exhibition Learning from Loheland at the MK&G presents a forgotten chapter of German design and art history: Loheland, a visionary feminist settlement and school project in the Rhön region in the state of Hesse that was founded concurrently with the Bauhaus in 1919. Loheland was influenced by social reform movements and avant-garde ideas for developing a new way of living. With a focus on the artistic aspects of Loheland, the MK&G has invited six contemporary women artists – the stage designer and artist Marie Gimpel (b. 1986), the visual artists Alex Hojenski (b. 1989) and Judith Kisner (b. 1983), the visual artist and filmmaker Jasmin Preiß (b. 1984), visual artist and musician Julia Rómas (b. 1994), and graphic designer Lea Sievertsen (b. 1990) – to explore the founding ideas of this extraordinary project in works developed especially for the exhibition.

Designed by Distaff Studio in Berlin and set in HAL Timezone by HAL Typefaces (studio hanli).

Designed by Manos Daskalakis for Baba au Rum, one of the World's 50 Best Bars, the awarded Bauhaus-infused catalog is a project that calls attention to the importance of typography and fonts in use.

The World's 50 Best Bars jury panel statement reads:

The secret behind the bar’s endurance is found in the impeccable taste of manager and owner Thanos Prunarus, whose love for the modernist movements of Bauhaus, Dada, and the Avant-Garde can be felt in the bar’s decor and sensibilities. It feels tropical but there are no trappings of the cabana kitsch – Baba feels urban, vital, and authentic. Even the hand-bound menu is a thing of beauty and the recent recipient of the Greek Design & Typography Awards EBGE 2022.

Opted for a heavy-in-type result, Daskalakis delved deep into the history of the early twentieth-century art movements that reshaped the visual language of our times and delivered a catalog that stands on its own as a design tribute to that seminal era when a massive visual metamorphosis ensued.

Featuring signature elements of Dadaism and Bauhaus across its pages, the catalog is a visual cocktail that keeps evolving. Typeset in a variety of type designs from the extensive portfolio of Parachute Typefoundry, the catalog is a type-spirited visual cocktail of carefully modeled designs and highly crafted letterforms. Its distinct design is attributed to the use of three typefaces, all created by Parachute’s founder and head designer Panos Vassiliou.

With the postmodern, multiscript, multifaceted, and variable type system of PF Grand Gothik as its pillar – a type design that pays homage to the grotesque/gothic typefaces of yesteryear – the design is complemented by the geometric forms of PF Online and the independent multi-awarded type foundry’s latest release, PF Expo, a type family nobly rooted in simple, rational, and absolutely functional Roman forms. The text typeface is a monospace version of PF DIN Serif.

Poster for the 1980 edition of the Avant Garde Festival of New York, held at the Passenger Ship Terminal in New York City. The festival was founded in 1963 by Avant Garde cellist and performance artist, Charlotte Moorman. The poster is credited to designer Jim McWilliams, who was the festival’s official graphic designer and also an Avant Garde performer and composer.

The poster is set entirely in Trump-Mediäval, with a field of very loosely-spaced smaller type spanning the lower half of the composition, and the large display type using the less-common extrabold “fett” weight of the family.

Detail, with signature by Jim McWilliams

The Two Avant-guards?! Rhymes / Два авангарда!? Рифмы is an exhibition put on by the AZ Museum of Moscow as a part of the contemporary art festival First factory of Avant-garde. The exhibition took place at the Ivanovo Regional Museum of Art in the city of Ivanovo, Russia, which rhymed avant-garde masterpieces from the Ivanovo collection with distinguished creations by artists from the latter half of the 20th century.

Ira Koshaleva of Tuman studio was in charge of the exhibit's visual communications and used Beatrice Display as the main font for the project, including posters, catalogs, and pamphlets. The supporting sans is unidentified. [It appears to be Aeroport, see comments.]

A business card for a printing office in Leipzig, designed by Jan Tschichold (then known as Iwan Tschichold, or ivan tschichold) in 1925, in the style of the New Typography, using exclusively type and borders, with geometric forms (here in the form of circular dots) added to support and emphasize the semantic structure (and not for arbitrary decoration).

At that time, young Tschichold (born 1902) was working as typographic designer at printer and publisher Fischer & Wittig, and also as assistant teacher at the Leipzig Academy, under Hermann Delitsch. In October of the same year, he made huge waves with the publication of a special issue of Typographische Mitteilungen. Compiled and designed by him, it presented works and texts by László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, Herbert Bayer, Kurt Schwitters, among other Modernist protagonists, and included a manifesto in which Tschichold outlines his ideas for an Elementare Typographie.

Regarding fonts to use, that meant: “Elementare Schriftform ist die Groteskschrift aller Variationen: mager — halbfett — fett — schmal bis breit.” (“The elementary typeface form is the sans serif of all variations: light — bold — black — condensed to extended.”) One of the already available typefaces that met the criteria of having elementary forms and being as matter-of-fact, impersonal and timeless as possible was Neue moderne Grotesk, a design that originated in 1908 at the Leipzig punchcutting firm Wagner & Schmidt, and went under numerous names. On the business card, it’s used in the fett weight, and exclusively in caps (“why have two characters for one sound?”). The light weight can be seen in use for “sonderheft” on the cover of the 1925 issue. In 1928, Tschichold would make extensive use of Neue moderne Grotesk for his book Die Neue Typographie.

The business card is part of an online exhibition curated by Linda Wößner and published by the Deutsches Buch- und Schriftmuseum der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek. The DNB has digitized the estate papers of Tschichold, and made them available online. To quote Dan Reynolds, that’s kind of amaze!

Fritz Knorr Buchdruckerei was located on Bayersche Straße 24. In 1928, the spelling was altered to Bayrische Straße, and in August 1945 the street got renamed to Arthur-Hoffmann-Straße, in memory of anti-fascist resistance fighter Arthur Hoffmann who had lived there, and whom the Nazis had murdered in January 1945.

The exhibition takes a new approach to Paul Cézanne’s œuvre by looking at points of connection between the French master and several important classical Avant-garde artists. This exhibition examines the constructive artistic trends that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century focused on the meeting points between the “newcomers” and Cézanne’s works. The typography tries to reflect this new approach with this new and customised version of Agena Display: it’s named Agena Ana and was commissioned from Coppers and Brasses, featuring different z letters designed by Anagraphic.

Cezanne to Malevich: Arcadia to Abstraction is shown at the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest until 13 February 2022.

With rhetorical violence, the Italian Futurists proclaimed their radical break with the past.

They no longer had an eye for the beautiful works of art and monuments of Europe's glorious past. What they admired were racing cars, athletes, train stations, rebellious crowds and ornate factory chimneys. They sang about the nocturnal vibrating glow of armories and workshops. They glorified war.

Futuristische Manifesten (futurist manifestos), published by Flemish publisher Letterwerk, contains the most important manifestos by Italian author, journalist and futurist champion Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The book presents the verbal power of Europe's most striking avant-garde in a new Dutch translation by Thomas Crombez.

The cover was designed by Dominique Barberis (EHB Ontwerp), using Noyh (Typesketchbook). The interior, designed by Kurt Cornelis, is set in Retype Foundry’s Guyot.

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La souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madame Beudet) is an impressionist short film made in 1923. It was directed by Germaine Dulac, “the first feminist filmmaker and a key figure in the development of the French Avant Garde cinema of the 1920s.” – Light Cone
“The story of the frustrations and fantasies of a young wife and her boorish, domineering husband, is told almost entirely from the woman’s perspective.” – Irina Leimbacher

The bilingual opening titles and intertitles of the silent film make prominent use of a sans serif that originated at Wagner & Schmidt, Leipzig. This punchcutting company specialized in distributing matrices to type foundries, who would then cast type from them, and sell the end product to printers. In other words, Wagner & Schmidt didn’t produce or sell any fonts, but rather focused on designing typefaces. Their creations can hence be found in the catalogs of numerous foundries, in German-speaking countries and beyond, under many different names. In Germany, the design in question is probably best known as Aurora-Grotesk. The film was produced by Charles Delac and Marcel Vandal with their firm Colisée-Films in Geneva, Switzerland. Chances are that the particular version used here – featuring French accents – is Akzidenz-Grotesk, which was the name used by the Swiss foundry Haas.

Earlier this year, Forgotten Shapes released a faithful digitization as Neue moderne Grotesk FSL, made by Stephan Müller in 2011–2019. The name of the digital reconstruction references the one chosen by the Ludwig Wagner foundry, a company with close ties to Wagner & Schmidt. You can read more about the intricate history of this typeface in an in-depth article written by Indra Kupferschmid, and richly illustrated with specimens from the collection of Stephan Müller. [Full disclosure: I helped with copy-editing the article.]

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The names of Germaine Dulac and André Obey are emphasized by the use of letterspaced uppercase letters.

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The main titles are set in an older grotesk of compressed width distinguished by a flat-tailed a. This typeface or a similar one was carried by the Haas type foundry under the generic name Enge Grotesk.

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Deep into the 20th century, it was common in German typography (as well as in sign painting and other lettering disciplines) to use the letter J for an I in initial position.

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While the ellipsis in the French text consists of four dots, the German equivalent has three, with more letterspacing.

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The text of a letter received by the husband is shown in (again bilingual) title cards, set in a script typeface that emulates handwriting.

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The typeface appears to be a version of Facsimile, which was cast by the Krebs foundry and others. The forms for k P S are different from the showings that I was able to consult.

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The language versions feature the same style of quotation marks and punctuation spacing. The former is in line with contemporary German standards, the latter matches what’s still common in French.

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Does the five-dot ellipsis hint at an especially intense dream?

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In Germany, Spaß (“joke”) is spelled with an eszett (ß). In Switzerland, this character never really was widely used outside of blackletter. The sound is represented by a double s.

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The film poster combines a still image featuring the two main actors, Germaine Dermoz as Madame Beudet and Alexandre Arquillière as Monsieur Beudet, and a text card in the same typography as the titles.

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Known as the Bolted Book because of its signature binding using two industrial bolts, Depero Futurista was conceived as a showcase and “portable museum” for the work of Italian Futurist artist Fortunato Depero (1892–1960). Written and designed by Depero, it was published in 1927 and dubbed “a typographical racing car” by Futurism’s founder, F.T. Marinetti. Today it’s recognized as the first modern-day artist’s book.

Designers & Books, in collaboration with the Center for Italian Modern Art and Mart, is currently running a crowdfunding campaign to print a facsimile edition. If you’re interested in getting your hands on a replica of this “avant-garde masterpiece” (MoMA), don’t hesitate: There are only a few days left to support the project and secure a copy.

Source: www.boltedbook.com Jason Burch. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome. License: All Rights Reserved.

Page 11 announces the launch of the Futurist art gallery Dinamo-Azari. “Written by publisher Fedele Azari, it describes Depero Futurista as “MECHANICAL: bolted like an engine,” warns it is “DANGEROUS: can be used as a projectile,” and declares it is “UNCLASSIFIABLE: cannot be placed alongside other books in the library.” — from the page by page annotations, which rely heavily on original research done by Gianluca Camillini, and were edited by Russell Fernandez with assistance from Raffaele Bedarida.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the fonts that Depero used. For more information about the artist and the book’s rich content, make sure to visit the dedicated website, boltedbook.com. Depero Futurista has 240 pages, 146 of them with text or images, many of which are purely typographic. I’ve examined ten sample pages which are reproduced below. On these pages, about 20 typefaces from 16 families are used. There are a few other typefaces that were used elsewhere in the book, but the vast majority was typeset in the fonts identified here.

One finding that may or may not come as a surprise is the stylistic diversity. At times, it seems as if Depero used all the fonts that were available at the print shop. There are several different romans and italics, a fat face, grotesks from narrow to wide and in various weights, italic sans serif, and two compressed advertising faces. Depero definitely showed less restraint than his fellow countryman Massimo Vignelli. He rather followed László Moholy-Nagy’s lead, who wrote in “The New Typography” from 1923:

We use all typefaces, type sizes, geometric forms, colors, etc. We want to create a new language of typography whose elasticity, variability, and freshness of typographical composition is exclusively dictated by the inner law of expression and the optical effect.

Some of the faces are relatively nondescript, like the old style Archiv-Antiqua, Depero’s primary choice for small body copy, or the various plain grotesks including Schelter & Giesecke’s Breite magere Grotesk and members of the Neue Moderne Grotesk / Aurora-Grotesk I–IV series (nondescript at least to today’s eyes). Others are stronger flavored, like Lucian Bernhard’s eponymous roman with its handdrawn-looking contours and the jolly, almost cartoonish look, or Sezessions-Grotesk, an austere monolinear Art Nouveau sans by Julius Klinkhardt. A remarkable number of the featured typeface designs originated north of the Alps, at foundries in Leipzig, Frankfurt, Offenbach, or Berlin. This hints at the dominant role that the German type industry, next to the British and French, must have played in the early 20th century, not only in Italy, but in many neighboring countries and beyond.

Source: www.kickstarter.com © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE Rome. License: All Rights Reserved.

Page 53, featuring lines in all caps, set on various angles, in seven fonts: Modena AKA Sansone (AKA Poppelbaum’s Schmale Block?) in two sizes (“Architetto”, “Arazzi”), Bernhard-Antiqua fett (“Teatro Magico”), Romanisch halbfett (“Glorie Plastiche”), and Schmale Etienne (“Motorumorismo Plastico”. The grotesks used for “Depero” and “pittore” are unidentified. The former might be Schelter & Giesecke’s Schmale fette Steinschrift [edit: and the latter is Etrusco nerissimo stretto, a copy of Mid-Gothic, see comments].

One of the most extensively used faces is a narrow sans with soft corners, similar to Berthold’s Block. It appears on at least 55 pages of the book. This typeface was sold by Fondografica in Turin as Modena and by Reggiani in Milano as Sansone. I’m pretty sure it’s identical to Schmale Block, shown in Seemann’s Handbuch der Schriftarten as an in-house design by the Poppelbaum foundry in Vienna, Austria from 1920. I still need to confirm this assumption, though – thanks to Dan Reynolds who has pointed me to a specimen that might have the answer and which I will consult soon.

The lettering on the cover gives us an idea of what genuinely futurist letterforms look like, according to Depero: elementary, constructed, unconventional, edgy. This attitude is echoed in the typeface choices only to little extent. It was not important to (or feasible for?) Depero to use new, forward-looking typeface designs. Modena AKA Sansone AKA Schmale Block might be the only one from after World War I, released seven years before the book was printed. All the other faces are older – Bernhard-Antiqua fett is from 1911, Aurora-Grotesk from the 1910s, Archiv-Antiqua from 1908, Lukrativ and Mignon from 1906, Sezessions-Grotesk from c. 1905, Schmale Herold from 1904 – or much older: (the precursors of) Normande, Old Gothic Bold Italic, Schelter & Giesecke’s Breite magere Grotesk, and Etienne schmal stem from the 19th century. Romanische Antiqua (or Anker-Romanisch) halbfett was issued by Schelter & Giesecke in 1895 (Grimoldi in Turin later carried the same design as Padova, and Nebiolo as Raffaello). Several of these faces feel downright dated, and must have smelled weird already in 1927. They’re certainly not what one would commonly expect to see in a Futurist publication.

What makes Depero’s book so seminal are not the fonts, but the imaginative arrangements. He skillfully plays with contrasting sizes and weights, column shapes, white space, orientation, and text as image. His dynamic layouts are all the more awe-inspiring when one brings to mind that this was done over 90 years ago, long before type was liberated from physical constraints, first by photographic and later digital means. Each of the pages had to be manually composed from hundreds of little pieces of metal type, and firmly locked up in a forme before it could go to print. This was already a laborious process for standard layouts, but truly challenging when diagonal, circular, or otherwise non-rectangular settings were involved. The revolution is not in the typefaces, but in the typography.

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Page 57 is the first in a series of typographic compositions Depero refers to as manifesti murali, or wall manifestos. [Camillini et al.] The arrow-shaped text is set in three sizes of Bernhard-Antiqua fett. The clumsy grotesk for “necessità di auto-rèclame” (“the need for self-promotion”) is unidentified. [edit: it’s again Etrusco nerissimo stretto, this time in lowercase, see comments].

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Page 61. “Designed to be read by rotating the page, this wall manifesto describes the Futurist approach to sculpture and the other plastic arts. Depero also celebrates Futurism as the culmination of the previous two movements, Impressionism and Cubism.” [Camillini et al.] Headlines in uppercase Bernhard-Antiqua fett, text in Archiv-Antiqua mager and halbfett (1908). All lines in the “Futurist quarter” are underlined. Note the nonchalant way of filling up the remaining space by repeating “ecc.” (etc.) 17 times.

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Page 65, “Il Futurismo immortale” (The Immortal Futurism). Romanisch halbfett is paired with Bernhard-Antiqua fett. The bold wide grotesk for “Marinetti” is unidentified (see also page 89) [edit: it’s likely Etrusco intestazione normale, see comments].

Source: www.boltedbook.com Jason Burch. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome. License: All Rights Reserved.

Page 67, “racconto grafico” (graphical tale). “This wall manifesto is an open letter to the Italian Minister of Education about the importance of visual literacy and of encouraging children to express themselves visually in all spontaneity and freedom.” [Camillini et al.] Deporo wasn’t shy of setting a whole page in italics. This decision here might have been made because it’s a letter, as a (distant) reference to handwriting. The big lowercase letters are from a late 19th-century fat italic that today is probably best known as Old Gothic Bold Italic. It went by numerous names incl. Fette Kursiv-Grotesk and Doric Italic. The Italian foundries Nebiolo and FTC had a version named Etrusco corsivo nerissimo which is shown in mid-20th century specimens with an r that is different from the one used here (with diagonal terminal). The text face matches Mignon (1906), except for the S. Maybe it’s an alternate, maybe it’s a modification made in the version that was available from Società Augusta as Fulgens (before 1914). [Update: Fulgens is shown in the January/February 1905 issue of Archivo Typographico with an S that matches the one in Mignon.] The German origin is still visible in the ch ligatures. Two sizes of Bernhard-Kursiv fett are used for emphasis.

Source: www.boltedbook.com Jason Burch. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome. License: All Rights Reserved.

Page 75, “il nuovo fantastico” (the fantastic new), in (not so new) Schmale Herold (1904). The compressed advertising face was sold by Fondografica as Lodi and by Reggiani as Licia. This page also features the similarly compressed Lukrativ (c. 1906) for “meccanici” as well as Schmale Block in at least five sizes.

Source: www.boltedbook.com Jason Burch. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome. License: All Rights Reserved.

Page 87, “Plastic Glories”. In addition to Sezessions-Grotesk (bottom two lines) and Neue Moderne Grotesk / Aurora-Grotesk I–IV VII (“Gloria Plastica”, see p.89), there are two more grotesks in use. Most of the text is set in Breite magere Grotesk. This face by Schelter & Giesecke was avaiable from the local foundry Reggiani as Eia. The big compressed sans is unidentified, and probably wood type.

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Page 89 opens a ten-page section devoted to Depero’s architectural work. [Camillini et al.] The text face again is Archiv-Antiqua (with halbfett for emphasis). The lines that form the A’s crossbar are set in Schmale Block and Normande (or a similar fat face). “Martellatori-Macchina” looks like the wide sans that was sold by Weber as Aurora breithalbfett (and by L. Wagner as Edel-Grotesk, etc.). “Glorie plastiche e villaggio futurista” is in Aurora-Grotesk II halbfett (1912), see Neue Moderne Grotesk / Aurora-Grotesk I–IV. Nebiolo had the latter under the name Cairoli tonda neretta, but it’s not clear whether their version was released before 1928.

The big stacked caps (“architettura publicitaria”) are only similar to this series. They are heavier than Aurora’s VII cut and lighter than the V (in Italy available as Etruria from FTC), and are distinguished by a very small aperture in C and a short middle arm in E [edit: it’s Etrusco intestazione normale, see comments].

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Page 101 has quotations by Futurist painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) and Depero himself, printed in orange. The fonts in use are Schmale Block and three sizes of Sezessions-Grotesk, with several descending alternates for c and e. The latter was also available from Italian foundries Società Augusta (as Melpomene, before 1914) and Fondografica (as Como).

Source: www.boltedbook.com Jason Burch. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome. License: All Rights Reserved.

Page 113 repeats the dedication to Marinetti that already appeared on page 13. “‘I set off this futurist creation as a sign of celebration for F. T. Marinetti.’ The letter W in the center of the composition is an Italian abbreviation of the words ‘long live’ as in ‘Long live Marinetti.’ It appears on numerous pages throughout Depero Futurista.” [Camillini et al.] The fonts used on this page include four sizes of Schmale Block, Lukrativ (“temporale-patriottico”), and Schmale Etienne (“cuore-bombarda”).

Catalog for the exhibition Perahim, la Parade Sauvage at the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg:

Draftsman, painter, illustrator and scenographer, Jules Perahim (1914–2008) is a major figure in the Romanian avant-garde. He’s the author of an abundant œuvre, both dreamlike and engaged, which he developed first in Bucharest and later in France. As a regular contributor to avant-garde journals, he later turned his attention to surrealism, while remaining very close to literature. Several trips to Africa left a mark on his painting, giving rise to vast dream landscapes. The catalog contains some one hundred pictorial and graphic works, as well as various documents and magazines, in which one can immerse onself in the constantly renewed fantasy and humor of an artist with frantic imagination.

A typographic equivalent of this was found in Magnificat, the superbly choreographed multistroke orgy dreamt up by Friedrich Peter in the early 1970s.

The secondary typeface is Larish Neue. Together with Atlas Grotesk, it is also used for the interior (not pictured).

Gingko Press:

In December 1913, Ezra Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams calling the London art/literary scene “The Vortex.” Wyndham Lewis in turn appropriated the term to christen his budding movement in the arts, “Vorticism.” Vorticism was baptized on June 20, 1914 in the first issue of BLAST, A Review of the Great English Vortex — Lewis’s revolutionary magazine. […] Described by Lewis as “violent pink,” but by some others as the “puce monster,” the large format magazine displays radical typography and design, features a “Vorticist Manifesto,” and bares eye-popping lists of items to be “Blessed” and “Blasted.”

The main typeface used for most of the manifesto part is Grotesque No. 9. The text typeface is similar to De Vinne Condensed as cast by Stephenson Blake, but it’s not a match. The (wood?) typefaces used for the title and some headings (“MANIFESTO.”, ”ENEMY OF THE STARS.”, not pictured) are yet unidentified, too. Both the framed and the roman numerals are in Latin Bold. Furthermore, there are several tertiary typefaces, like Caslon’s Atlas (for “THE EGOIST”, not pictured) in the ad section. Printed by Leveridge & Co. (T.U.), St. Thomas’ Road, Harlesden.

In Wyndham Lewis: A Critical Guide, Andrzej Gąsiorek and Nathan Waddell note:

The words are Lewis’s, but it is probable that some or all of the design was done by William Henry Leveridge, head of Leveridge & Co., who printed both numbers of BLAST. The structure BLAST / BLESS is not original, but is taken from Guillaume Apollinaire’s (possibly pastiche) Futurist manifesto L'Antitradition Futuriste: Manifeste=synthese, first published in French (dated ‘29 Juin 1913’, p. 3). This uses two antitheses, ‘Destruction’ against ‘Construction’ and 'Merde Aux’ against ‘Rose Aux’. Destruction is urged upon ‘l’harmonie typographique’ (p. 1), a hint that Lewis may have taken.

A facsimile edition was published by Gingko Press, but is currently out of stock. A pdf edition of both the first issue and the second (and final) one from July 1915 is available from the Modernist Journals Project, a joint project by Brown University and The University of Tulsa.

No. 6, June 1934. Designed by Luigi Veronesi.

“Campo Grafico was Italy’s premiere, independent printing, typography and graphic design journal of the 1930s. 66 issues were published in Milan, Italy from January 1933 to May 1939. The journal pioneered a platform for discussions and experiments re: the ideals of European avant-garde design.”

No. 5, May 1934. Designed by Giovanni Broggi.

No. 7, July 1934.

No. 6, June 1933.

No. 5, May 1933. Designed by Carlo Pirovano and Confalonieri.

No. 12, December 1933. Designed by Enrico Kaneclin.