Ahmad Jamal at the Blackhawk features live recordings of jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal, performing at The Blackhawk, San Francisco. The album was released in 1962 by Argo, a jazz-focused sublabel of Chess Records. The album title is set in Stop.

Ahmad Jamal— jazz pianist, composer, bandleader, and educator — died this week, aged 92.

[More info on Discogs]

“Another Girl, Another Planet” is a song by British rock band the Only Ones. It was first released in 1978. This split single with “Pretty In Pink” by Psychedelic Furs on the B-side was issued in 1992, accompanying the compilation album The Sound of The Suburbs. “The Only Ones” is in caps from Walter Höhnisch’s Stop. The song names are in ITC Franklin Gothic Heavy.

Division Leap, a dealer specializing in counterculture books, periodicals, and ephemera, just listed this item:

Austin: Austin Vanguard, [1977]. 4to, tabloid format, single sheet of newsprint folded once; offset printed in two colors.

The first and only issue of one of the first, if not the first, punk fanzine published in the state of Texas. No attribution is given, but the zine is believed to be the work of Nick West, who would go on to edit Sluggo, one of the greatest art zines of the late 70's. The phrase “Someday All the Adults Will Die” emblazoned on the cover summed up many of the beautiful contradictions of early American punk.

The logo uses Eras, commonly seen in the 1970s, particularly after its release by ITC in 1976. The rest of the text, however, is set in a much less common typeface from the 1930s. Stop is an early emulation of dry brush lettering as metal type. It seems unlikely the Austin Vanguard originated on letterpress, so it’s possible the designers found Stop as transfer lettering or phototype.

A guide to Hamburg Airport for passengers and freight shipper issued in 1956 and describing the various airport services and the city’s attractions.

The script on the cover is Stop, a.k.a. Stop-Pinselschrift (“Stop brush script”), a bold wide cursive that emulates sign writing done with a dry brush. It was cut at Ludwig & Mayer after drawings by Walter Höhnisch and first cast in 1939. Thirty-two years later, Nebiolo issued a very different typeface under the same name.

La Femme de trente ans (English: A Woman Of Thirty) is a novel written by Honoré de Balzac between 1829 and 1842. This is a German edition published by Saar-Verlag in Saarbrücken around 1948, when the city was part of the French Saar Protectorate.

The typeface used in all caps on the cover is Die Schlanke (“The Slender One”). Designed by Walter Höhnisch, it was first cast by Ludwig & Mayer in Frankfurt around 1938. The ilustration is signed by “straub”.

Leaflet advertising stencils for embroidering monograms, including “‘Monogra’, the distinguished monogram”. The sheet was issued by the Johann Merkenthaler factory of metal stencils in Nuremberg, Germany, probably in the mid-1930s. The simplified gotisch is Walter Höhnisch’s National schmal halbfett, or bold condensed, which was first cast in 1933. The geometric sans serif is Erbar-Grotesk (1926).

See Riccardo’s post for an earlier product catalog by Merkenthaler as well as more information about the company.

A fine contemporary advert for the Pilkington’s Glass Works product “Vitroflex” issued in 1937. This, thanks to the flexible backing sheet, allowed coloured and mirrored finishes to be fitted to curved surfaces and this rather accorded to the contemporary architectural vogue. It shares a similar tradename to Vitrolite, the coloured glass sheets developed in the US and that Pilkington's had acquired rights to in 1932.

At the time of the advert Pilkington’s were highly successful not just because of their willingness to adapt to new glass making technologies but also their marketing techniques. Glass, as a decorative and semi-structural material, was very much in fashion as the 1930s progressed and modern architecture that made much of ‘light’ and techniques such as curtain walling were a growing market for the company.

The slab-serif caps are from Ludwig & Mayer’s Tempo. Designed by Walter Höhnisch and first cast in 1930, it was marketed as bold condensed companion to Hans Wagner’s Welt-Antiqua. For markets abroad, Tempo was named Luxor Bold Condensed (and Welt-Antiqua was known as Luxor). Tempo also went under the names Nilo (Nebiolo) and Ultra schmal halbfett (Schriftguss).

The body copy is set in Imprint (Monotype, 1913), with loose linespacing, non-lining numerals, and fractions. The bottom line features Erbar-Grotesk (Ludwig & Mayer, 1926) in tracked out caps.

“Greetings from place of pilgrimage Maria Eck”

Kloster Maria Eck is a Franciscan monastery in Siegsdorf, Bavaria.

The pen script on the first card is Arabella, designed by Arno Drescher and issued by the Ludwig Wagner foundry in 1936. The second one uses the similar Skizze, drawn by Walter Höhnisch for Ludwig & Mayer in 1935. While Arabella has been digitized at least twice, Skizze is not available in digital form yet.

Both cards were published by Foto-Kaesberg, Ruhpolding, probably sometime around 1980. From MTP’s ephemera collection.

Maria Eck is located 882 metres above sea level (“Meter über dem Meer”).

We Want Miles is a double album with recordings from Boston, New York and Tokyo, by jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, released by Columbia Records in 1982. Cover photo: Yoshihisa Yoneda.

The W/W image rhyme is completed by changing Miles’ M for a flipped W. The cover type was manually slanted (and made more bold?). It is derived from a bold extended style of one of the early-20th century grotesques from Germany, probably Aurora-Grotesk (Annonce) or Venus.

The red text on the back was set in a yet unidentified geometric sans serif with a straight-legged M [edit: it’s Vogue Extra Bold Oblique, see comments].

Packaging

The Oli Rotomin is a pencil distinguished by a constantly rotating lead. Read more about this “revolutionary innovation in the field of drafting pencils” on Leadholder, the online drafting pencil museum curated by Dennis B. Smith.

Instruction sheet

A mid-1930s photo identification from the collection of Flickr user altpapiersammler. The pass entitled the holder to discounted tickets for two aerial tramways in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria.

The titling typeface is Narziß, an open Roman by Walter Tiemann, released in 1921 by Gebr. Klingspor. There are two different digitizations, both under the English name Narcissus. Neither Jim Spiece’s (Spiece Graphics, 1993, with a Solid cut) nor Brian Lucid’s version (Font Bureau, 1995) is a 100% faithful rendition: ‘Q’ and comma are closer to the metal original in the former, ‘Æ’ is more authentic in the latter. Diacritics and guillemets are off in both revivals. So is the eszett. The digital versions lack the long s (ſ) and most of the ligatures included in the original (ch, ck, ff, fi, fl, ft, ſi, ſſ, tz). Their hyphen is single, not double as depicted above.

Narziß itself is a revival. In “Decorated types” (The Fleuron, Vol. 6, 1928), Stanley Morison mentions that “Tiemann re-drew … shadowed letters which Fournier had made in 1760”. After the Pelican Press had introduced it in 1922, the typeface became quite popular. Morison: “To-day no printer who works for advertisers can afford to be without ‘Narcissus’, and it has arrived in the United States, doubtless because it possesses more spirit than the ‘hand-tooled’ Goudy”.

The roman is Tages-Antiqua, designed by Louis Hoell and released in 1913 by Flinsch (re-released a decade later by Bauer after the takeover). There is no digital version yet, but Bauer Types SA still claims a trademark.

The only blackletter here is from the stamps by the Ortspolizeibehörde (local police department) and the Marktgemeinderat (local council). These stamps must have been new, because the twin city didn’t exist before 1935. “Garmisch and Partenkirchen remained separate until their respective mayors were forced by Adolf Hitler to combine the two market towns … in anticipation of the 1936 Winter Olympic games.”—Wikipedia. The typeface used for the police stamp is National schmalhalbfett, released in 1933 by Ludwig & Mayer.

This book jacket for a German edition of Ballif’s Dancers of God, a book about pygmies, is one of the “serving suggestions” that were included in the specimen for Charme (1957). The designer of this brush script typeface is Helmut Matheis, who celebrates his 96th birthday today.

The secondary typeface is the condensed cut of Jakob Erbar’s Candida (also for Ludwig & Mayer). The language of the blurb is not politically correct by any modern standards.

Posted as an addendum to my blog article about the Volksbühne poster campaign.

In the blog post, I wrote “Volksbühne is blackletter. Blackletter is Volksbühne.” It should become clear what I meant by that when you take a look at the countless flyers for the events of the current season. LSD Design uses more than a dozen different blackletter typefaces, from all subcategories. They are claiming the whole genre for the Volksbühne identity – and it works, because hardly anyone else dares to use these typefaces.

There is textura, fraktur, and one bastarda (Zeitungs-Schwabacher). Some are well-known, like Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch, others relatively obscure, like Münchner Gotisch. Linotype Textur is not the only contemporary design: there is also Agincourt (David Quay, 1983) and Avebury (Jim Parkinson, 2005). One could think that each flyer got its own typeface, but that’s not true. Some appear twice, like Haenel Fraktur, some even three times, like Deutsche Reichsschrift.

There are three exponents of the controversial simplified gotisch or “schaftstiefelgrotesk”: Nürnberg (Ludwig Wagner, 1934), Tannenberg (D. Stempel AG, 1933–35) and National (Ludwig & Mayer, 1933–38). Unlike on the posters, Potsdam does not make an appearance here (yet). Tannenberg (Das Duell, Dancing About) is confusingly similar to National (Kill your Darlings!). Seeing all the elements of the eclectic visual identity in context, I must admit that, from a formal standpoint, it makes sense to include some simpler, unadorned typefaces – blackletter grotesks, so to say – in the mix.

The backside of each sticker holds information about the event. This text is presented rather conventionally, in Akzidenz-Grotesk.

The showcases on the outside of the Volksbühne building display the monthly program, unfolded. The actual agenda is not in blackletter, but in Akzidenz-Grotesk. The URL and the verso with the Warhol quote is in Deutsche Reichsschrift.

The figures on the monthly program leaflets for August/September and October are from Tannenberg Schmalfett.

The assorted take-away flyers, as they are offered in the Volksbühne foyer.

Posted as an addendum to my blog article about the Volksbühne poster campaign.

Volksbühne’s spielzeitheft – the season magazine – for 2013/14 is a large-format brochure (DIN A3) with 88 pages. There are a number of black-and-white photos by Lenore Blievernicht, but most of it is purely typographic. As with the posters, a mix of blackletter typefaces has been used, but here the palette is even wider.

Typesetting German text in blackletter traditionally requires two forms for the lowercase ‘s’: the ‘long s’ (ſ) is the default. The round one, with which we are more familiar today, may only go at the end of words (more precisely: at the end of morphemes, which include prefixes or parts of compounds). The rules are in fact slightly more complicated than that, but not much. If you are interested, you can find a serviceable guideline by Friedrich Forssman both in Albert Kapr’s Fraktur and in Judith Schalansky’s Fraktur Mon Amour. Or get yourself an old edition of the Duden.

In the blackletter orgy that is the new identity of the Volksbühne Berlin, these orthotypographic rules have been ignored, much to the regret of the typography teacher in me. If you choose to use blackletter, I feel you should go all the way, and respect the special rules that come with the genre. Seeing an ‘ſ’ in final position like in -haus, das, Eins etc. hurts my eyes. Having an inappropriate ‘ſ’ in the middle of a word is worse. The theater’s name should have an ‘s’, because it is Volks·bühne (“people’s theater”). With an ‘ſ’, it reads Volk·sbühne, which is nonsense. It is similar to wrong hyphenation, think the·rapist vs. ther·apist.

It would have been understandable if LSD decided to dispense with the ‘ſ’, because it is so uncommon today. Heck, I could possibly even understand it if they used ‘ſ’ exclusively, for it is such a weird character! What they did, however, is always using the default glyph of the respective font. Sometimes that’s the ‘s’, sometime the ‘ſ’. (Note that almost all digital blackletter fonts come with both forms, even the freebies.) A pragmatic decision? I call it lazy and ignorant. But who knows – maybe the ignorance is intentional, and the carefreeness with which the rules were violated is another factor that helps undermining the historic burden of German blackletter in general, and of the simplified gotisch types from the 1930s in particular.

The cover and a few divider pages like this one are printed in orange. Only there, the letterforms are scribbled. The rest shows the glyphs as they are included in the fonts, be they razor-sharp or chubby. The stacked letters for neu (“new”) were handdrawn after the ultrablack Avebury, which was designed in 2005 by Jim Parkinson, “inspired by an early blackletter from the Caslon Foundry”.

A series of video presentations by Jürgen Kuttner, with a title that references the first stanza of the Deutschlandlied, typeset in Tannenberg Fett (1934).

The schmal (condensed) cut of Rudolf Koch’s Wallau is another typeface that was released in 1934.

The German umlaut dots on ‘äöü’ once started life as a superscript ‘e’. Linotype Textur exhibits this historic form.

Three lines of Deutsche Reichsschrift (1915–35) by Arthur Pestner. The third word reads Eins (“one”), not Einf. It should be with a round ‘s’, though, as it is the last letter in the word.

The blackletter hyphen typically is double and slightly angled. When centering lines horizontally, make sure to adjust optically and compensate for hyphens and other punctuation. Of course, this only applies when you’re aiming for fine typography. LSD Design obviously isn’t.

Baumeister needs a ‘long s’, and ideally an ‘ſt’ ligature. Wilhelm-Klingspor-Schrift indeed has such a ligature, even in the digital versions. Furthermore, in German blackletter, there can never be two ‘round s’ in a row. At the end of words, a double ‘s’ becomes an eszett: Solneß.

Bayreuth (1932 or 1935) paired with Schmalfette Gotisch (1934). Both typefaces were originally designed by F.H. Ernst Schneidler. Schottenstück should be with an ‘ſ’ and ligatures for ‘ch’ and ‘ck’.

12-Spartenhaus is set in National Fett (1934). The roman numerals on the verso denote the month of the event – this play is staged from October. The numerals as well as the small print is in Akzidenz-Grotesk.

“The Youth Theater” – the word Jugend in Tannenberg looks familiar, but it’s not a comfortable association.

Volksbühne in Tannenberg – just like it was in 1936? Not really: it’s handdrawn, it’s in bright orange, and it doesn’t give a damn about the s-rules.