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.

Grandparent’s Delight is the name of my well-stocked home bar, and in the years since I developed a cane sugar allergy, Grandparent’s Delight has also lent its name to a range of housemade decoctions, infusions, and liqueurs designed as cane-free alternatives to commercial products. A set of labels were designed to give these products a more legitimate presence on the liquor shelf. To complete the illusion, the labels fall into several different visual sub-brands under the umbrella of Grandparent's Delight:

• The Fernets: lightly sweetened liqueurs principally flavored with saffron and bitter aloes. Labels are set in Beaux Arts Didot and Polliwog.

• The Génépis: complex, high-proof herbal liqueurs flavored with the alpine herb génépi. Labels are set in Hesse Antiqua (including one of Hesse Antiqua's ornaments) and a coarse optical size of Kyrios.

• The “single-notes”: pure infusions of a single ingredient, typically fruit. Labels are set in FF Bauer Grotesk.

• The Grandparent’s Delight house brand: a catch-all category for multi-ingredient recipes. Labels are haphazardly set in Bild. (Spot the customized cedilla.)

• Aquavit, a nordic infusion of caraway, uses Kabel and (what else?) Kumlien.

A workmanlike universal label for the back side of each bottle uses Pitch and Pitch Sans and provides space for detailed notes on the batch.

Süßmost – Volksgetränk! (“Sweet must – popular drink!”) is a “practical guide for making unfermented fruit and berry juices at home and in the family”, edited by Maria Kirschner and Alfons Baumgärtner and published by the Catholic Hoheneck-Verlag who dedicated several of its titles to the fight against alcoholism. In 1934, it was located in Berlin SW 48. Baumgärtner may or may not be identical with the clergyman of this name. The cover illustration is by Paula Fischer (signed as “PF”).

The image is taken from the Flickr stream of Rolf Müller a.k.a. grispx, who comments: “The self-supply of the people was one of the percepts of the National Socialists… maybe the least malicious maxim of them.”

Signal is here seen with its eszett (ß) and two umlauts. The blackletter is the bold weight of Senats-Fraktur, designed by Friedrich Bauer and first cast by Genzsch & Heyse in 1912.

Slipcase with all 14 books

Between 1925 and 1930, the Bauhaus published a series of 14 books, authored by teachers and friends of the legendary design school. The titles discussed the ideas of the Bauhaus in art, design and architecture. In response to the Bauhaus Centennial in 2019, all 14 Bauhausbücher were re-issued in 2021 by Lars Müller Publishers in collaboration with Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung in a English translation, preserving the original typography and design.

The digital re-issue required the use of digital revivals of the original typefaces used – four of those books utilise LD Genzsch Antiqua by Michael Wörgötter / Lazydogs as their main text face: Book 10 Dutch Architecture by Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud, Book 11 The Non-Objective World by Kasimir Malevich, Book 13 Cubism by Albert Gleizes, and Book 14 From Material to Architecture by László Moholy-Nagy. The typeface’s original features such as the historical hyphen and the em dash enable a redesign true to the original publication.

Book jacket of Dutch Architecture feat. Akzidenz-Grotesk fett

Pages 26–27 from Dutch Architecture feat. LD Genzsch Antiqua and Akzidenz-Grotesk. The caption uses an unidentified font, see comments.

Pages 28–29 from Dutch Architecture feat. LD Genzsch Antiqua and Akzidenz-Grotesk

Book jacket of Cubism with the English title added in Helvetica Inserat or similar, see comments

Pages 84–85 from Dutch Architecture feat. LD Genzsch Antiqua and Akzidenz-Grotesk

Double-page spread from Cubism feat. LD Genzsch Antiqua and what looks like Helvetica Extended

Pages 84–85 from Cubism feat. LD Genzsch Antiqua and Helvetica. Page numbers appear to be from Akzidenz-Grotesk Super.

Book jacket of From Material to Architecture, with the English title added in what looks like Akzidenz-Grotesk Bold

Pages 92–93 from From Material to Architecture feat. LD Genzsch Antiqua and Akzidenz-Grotesk (in Bold and Super weights)

Pages 96–97 from From Material to Architecture feat. LD Genzsch Antiqua and Akzidenz-Grotesk. The caption on the right is set in a digitization of Neue Moderne Grotesk, with the paragraph below in Volta.

With this comprehensive guide book, Heike Schnotale and Michael Wörgotter have presented a long overdue compendium on the subject of lead typesetting and letterpress printing. The book contains technical information, the historical background, practical tipps as well as anecdotes and stories of and around the craft.

The design of the book itself also alludes to the subject within: The book is largely typeset in Michael Wörgötter’s own LD Genzsch Antiqua – a revival type family that was created as the summation of his large scale research project into the original lead type Genzsch-Antiqua by Friedrich Bauer.

Bleisatz. Ein Werkstattbuch was published in Rheinwerk’s Design series.

Narrative designed the graphic identity of Cinémas 21 (Christine 21 and Écoles 21). The treatment of the suffix “21”, like a mathematical power, gives a common graphic denominator to the two arthouse cinemas (both located in the 6th arrondissement of Paris), as well as to the Cinemas 21 entity that groups the two sites. Narrative also imagines the model of the monthly Cinéma 21 programs in the form of a 3-fold brochure.

Marianina, designed by Alisa Nowak and Jeremie Hornus, Domaine Sans Text by Kris Sowersby, and DIN Condensed are used for titles. FF Bauer Grotesk is chosen for its geometric construction and its art deco style reflecting the time of the cinemas’ construction.

Trennert-Antiqua FSL paired with Folio FSL (both yet unreleased) in No Two Alike: Karl Blossfeldt, Francis Bruguière, Thomas Ruff (Verlag für moderne Kunst).

The publication No Two Alike documents the exhibition of the same name, curated by Ulrike Meyer Stump and was published on the occasion of the FotoFocus Biennial 2018 and the exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati.

Karl Blossfeldt's, Francis Bruguière’s and Thomas Ruff’s mutual interest in the variant as a creative principle and the idea that each of these bodies of work presents a variant of the other is shown in the exhibition and also through the publication of No two alike.

In this acrostic, the stacked initials from Schraffierte Glass-Antiqua (“Shaded Glass Roman”, Genzsch & Heyse, 1913) form the brand name “Bromograph”. They are paired with Genzsch-Kursiv (the italic companion to Genzsch-Antiqua, 1907).

Bromograph is the trade name of a machine “used for multiple developing and printing of photographs from one negative onto a continous roll of paper” [Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences, CC BY-NC-ND]. The Bromograph-Aktiengesellschaft was located at Alte Jakobstraße 9 in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Paul Drews GmbH is another manufacturer of photographic reproduction machines (or the successor?) at the same address, mentioned in 1927, 1932 and 1941.

This ad was included in Gebrauchsgraphik Vol. 3, No. 4 from April 1926.

Artist Luise Schröder was invited to develop a concept for a decentralized memorial to Eduard Rosenthal as part of the Botho-Graef-Kunstpreis 2018.

Her work Zum Wohle des ganzen Landes (“For the benefit of the entire country”) is one of the initial applications of Trennert-Antiqua FSL, a digital re-issue by Stephan Müller and Reymund Schröder of an original type design by Friedrich Bauer (Schriftgießerei J.D. Trennert & Sohn, 1926).

Trennert-Antiqua is paired with Neue Moderne Grotesk FSL, another typeface revival that will be released in the Forgotten Shapes Library later in 2019, based on a design that is related to Aurora-Grotesk.

The commemorative plate designed by Schröder honors the Jewish jurist Eduard Rosenthal (1853–1926) who authored the constitution of Thuringia. It addresses the void in the culture of remembrance that is associated with his person. The plate is to be produced in an edition of 1.08 million copies and then sent as a gift to all households in the state of Thuringia.

Serial Killer is the first festival for TV / online series taking place in Brno, Czech Republic. Its visual style, designed by Martin Pecina, was strongly inspired by horror and monster movies of the 1940s and 1950s as well as some ‘film noir’ titles of the same era. That was the reason why TV monoscopes and distortions are accompanied with heavy negative type in diagonal composition, drop shadows and bold underlines.

The partly aggressive and partly playful festival name was supported with striking exclamation marks replacing all I glyphs both in logotype and other texts – typeset with Bauer Grotesk with support from Monolina. Moreover, all Czech diacritical marks were replaced by their ultra-simplified forms, supporting display qualities of the type.

This edition is set in Erbar-Mediäval lichtfett (1922) and Genzsch-Antiqua (1906–1910). It was printed by J.G. Oncken Nachf., G.m.b.H., Kassel, probably in the 1920s. The ad on the back cover mentions two of Polak’s pudding brands, “Mändelchen” and “Dreimühlen”.

Weihnachten im Liede is the title of a booklet with Christmas carols, produced as promotional gift by the German subsidiary of A.J. Polak, a manufacturer of custard powder, in Weener/Ems, East Frisia. There were at least four editions, each with a different cover typography.

Abraham Josef Polak founded the host company in Groningen, The Netherlands, in 1899. His uncle, Calmer Polak Gzn., had moved there in 1866 to trade in “colonial goods” and liquors, and became best known for his lemonade sirup brand “Ranja”. To distinguish the two entrepreneurs, uncle Calmer (1840–1922) was popularly called the “wet” Polak, while nephew Abraham (d. 1924) was known as the “dry” one. [De verhalen van Groningen, Joods Amsterdam] Kantoor Groningen:

During the Second World War, the German occupiers introduced the “ordinance of expulsion of Jews from the business world” which meant the end for the Polak family, since they were of Jewish origin. While they were being deported to Auschwitz to be murdered, the factory kept running under a German manager.

In the course of this “Aryanization”, Wiard Popkes, former director of the factory in Weener, not only usurped the German subsidiary, he also became the new owner of the parent company in the occupied Netherlands—much to the chagrin of the managers of German industry giant Dr. Oetker, who had hoped to take over the Dutch competitor themselves. [Dr. Oetker und der Nationalsozialismus]

The factory in Groningen had to close down in 1963, the one in Weener held out until the 1990s. The famous brand name “Polaks Mändelchen-Pudding” was acquired by RUF in Quakenbrück in 1993 and is continued to the present day.

This edition (1940s?) uses Nordland, a cursive with blackletter elements. The typeface was first cast by Trennert in 1935, based on drawings by Heinz Beck. The back cover is lettered.

Another edition printed on cheap paper (1950s?), featuring the same illustration, but another 1930s script typeface: This is Reporter, designed by Carlos Winkow and issued by the Norddeutsche Schriftgießerei in 1938. The font contained a number of ligatures. This setting uses ch and en (but not ei).

According to eichwaelder.de, this edition might have been issued in the 1960s. The serifless roman is Colonia, designed by Walter Ferdinand Kemper and released by Ludwig & Mayer in 1938.

Identity for a film production company in Hamburg.

24-page art booklets with commentary from Jeni, designed by the Jeni's in-house creative team to support Jeni's Ice Creams’ spring 2015 Colors Collection.

Set in Genzsch-Antiqua (AKA Nordische Antiqua) by Friedrich Bauer c. 1907.

I especially like the “Drahtwort: Genzeyse”, that was something like a URL shortener for a telegram service.