Flyer for a punk gig with Bombardement (Bordeaux) and Cagnard (Marseille) at Le Winger in Toulouse.

Karuta is a traditional Japanese card game where players listen to short descriptions read aloud from a reader’s card. Each turn, players race to grab the matching card with the corresponding picture or text, and the player with the most cards at the end wins.

Font Karuta is a variation designed for typography enthusiasts. Instead of pictures, the reader announces the font name and description on the reader’s card, and players compete to pick up the card displaying that font. The player who collects the most cards wins the game.

This edition is the “extension package” featuring only blackletter designs.

From top left to bottom right: Respira Black, FF Brokenscript, a couple letters from Breitkopf-Fraktur, Blackmoor, Claudius, an e and an exclamation mark from Old English, Wallau, Amador, Fakir, San Marco, American Text, Caslon-Gotisch, Engravers Old English, Marian Black, Fette Fraktur, Lucida Blackletter, JAF Herb, Gutenberg Textura, Alte Schwabacher, Goudy Text, Fette Kanzlei, and a tiny bit of Fette Gotisch. Featured in the game but not shown in the images are Deutsche Schrift and Wedding Text.

The box front features the title in Amador, with Clairvaux for the list of included typefaces. The Japanese font appears to be DNP Shuei ShogoMincho. The Font Karuta logo is in Akko.

The German-language game instructions are set in Gutenberg Textura with a headline in Blackmoor, in caps of alternating colors.

Title page of the book Schellers ausführliche lateinische Sprachlehre oder sogenannte Grammatik, Second Edition, published by Caspar Fritsch in Leipzig, 1782

At the very beginning of the chapter “Italics, small capitals... [etc.]”, of the book The Form of the Book, Tschichold comments on typographic differentiation in scientific books, and uses the case of a Latin grammar in German to illustrate a good example of the use of various typefaces in a text, to create an illuminating contrast. Here's a passage from the English edition:

There were, and are, always publications whose text will benefit and become more lucid and comprehensive if some manner of type differentiation is applied. We cannot help but envy Immanuel Scheller’s setting of the Ausführliche lateinische Sprachlehre (Comprehensive Latin Grammar), Leipzig, 1782 […]. Scheller in 1782 used roman and italic for Latin words. The enviable author and typesetter had at his disposal four different fonts of the same size for four categories of words. […] And how much better-looking a combination is Alte Schwabacher and Breitkopf Fraktur than Garamond and semibold Garamond! Scheller in his grammar book perfectly presents the difference between German and Latin through the clever use of contrasting shapes, Fraktur and Schwabacher on the one hand, roman and italic on the other.

The roman used must be a “Garamond”, at least judging by the italics (although the italics seem to come from a different typeface, or are at least used in a slightly larger body, cf. p. 776–777), but this is not clear. In any case, what is certainly interesting, and Tschichold is right, is the use of the four typographic varieties, and above all the Alte Schwabacher–Breitkopf-Fraktur pair, which form an exemplary body of text.

Page 559 (the one used by Tschichold to illustrate the chapter "Italics, Small Capital...", from his The form of the Book)

Video screenshot 1

Intro artwork for a video on a Fugue written by Johann Sebastian Bach (Contrapunctus 9).

I found an original manuscript by Bach that featured a stunning handdrawn symmetry-based artwork below the manuscript (see his personal logo engraved in center). I traced this image with Adobe Illustrator to seperate the tapestry drawing and combined it with a German blackletter typeface for the title.

First edition of The Art of Fugue published 1751. Artwork by J.S. Bach shown above can be found on page 30.

Screenshot 2

Raw trace from Adobe Illustrator

“Die Kunst der Fuge” meaning “the Art of Fugue”

Animal and hunting stories by Hermann Löns. With pen drawings by Friedrich Hauchecorne. Issue 67 in the Kranz-Bücherei series, published by Verlag Moritz Diesterweg in 1928. The cover typeface is Rudolf Koch’s Maximilian.

The title page is set in two or more yet unidentified Fraktur typefaces. The title might be in Leibniz-Fraktur, the smaller lines look like a version of Breitkopf-Fraktur.