This catalog by the lighting department of the Berlin-Anhaltische Maschinenbau-Actien-Gesellschaft, or Bamag-Licht for short, was issued in 1909 in Charlottenburg, some eleven years before this city became incorporated into Greater Berlin.

The booklet cover was printed in two colors, using fonts that can be combined in layers. The main typeface is a version of De Vinne Open, or De Vinne Outline. Like regular De Vinne, this variant originated with the Central foundry, in roman and italic styles. Catalogs by ATF, the successor to Central, pointed out that the Italic would register for color printing with solid De Vinne. They didn’t do so for the upright style. Also, ATF’s catalogs from 1896, 1897, 1899, and 1902 all show the Italic only. The earliest appearance for the roman Open that I found so far is from 1903.

The Hoffmeister foundry from Leipzig, Germany showed an upright Zierschrift „De Vinne“ with open styles for bicolor printing already in 1895. This design was named Amerikanische Mediäval by 1900, and continued by Stempel under that name after the acquisition of Hoffmeister in 1918. Klinkhardt, another Leipzig foundry, had such open styles, too, as Bianca breit with Bianca Kursiv. They added a schmal (condensed) style before 1905. Bianca was continued by Berthold into the 1920s.

However, the specific version used here can’t be Klinkhardt’s: in Bianca, even thin strokes like the bars in f or t are outlined – in De Vinne Outline, this is only true for the largest sizes. More decisively, Bianca’s T is flat at the top, without any upward-pointing serifs. We’re hence looking at Hoffmeister’s cut, which closely follows the original De Vinne design, including this detail. It also sports the double hyphen, a remnant of blackletter conventions that lingered on in roman type and lettering at the time.

Lichte Amerikanische Mediäval (“Open American Oldstyle”) is filled with its solid counterpart (≈ De Vinne), and paired with a shaded all-caps grotesque for “Abteilung 12”. This face appears to be one of the precursors to a design that ATF reissued in the 1930s as Marble Heart. It may have originated in France, and was carried by Haenel and many other German-speaking foundries. Flinsch had a version for bicolor printing as Buntdruck-Schriften 1874–1876, released around 1894. Three cheers for Dan Reynolds and his invaluable work on cataloging the sans serif type­faces sold in German-speaking Europe during the nineteenth century! As coincidence would have it, Hoffmeister’s bicolor De Vinne and Flinsch’s Buntdruckschriften were presented on opposing pages in the first issue of Archiv für Buchgewerbe und Gebrauchsgraphik from 1895.

The header on the title page is set in Sorbonne (1905), Berthold’s recutting of Cheltenham. The products – torches, outdoor lamps, incandescent bodies, equipment – use Grasset (1898; cast in Germany by Genzsch & Heyse before 1904). The insert mentioning a 20% discount combines Romana and Undine. The latter was made at Stempel in mager (1902) and fett (1903) weights, as an extension of the all-caps Graphik, which was their version of Edina. Undine’s lighter style was digitally revived by Linotype as Grafiko.

The typography on thsi spread exclusively uses Grasset.

Be Here Now (or Remember, Be Here Now) is a 1971 book on spirituality, yoga, meditation, etc. It was written by Ram Dass (a.k.a. Dr. Richard Alpert) a spiritual teacher known for his 1960s collaborations with Timothy Leary in the study of psychedelic drugs, particularly LSD.

The book is a feat of non-mechanical text arrangement, composed almost entirely with hand-stamped rubber type, often intertwined with elaborate illustrations to create a unique style of concrete literature. It was originally published as a box set containing several separate items in a limited edition, but has sold more than 2 million copies in a paperback format that combines all the content in one binding.

As Michael Cunningham describes the original book:

From Bindu to Ojas (the core book) was created in a New Mexico ashram (Lama Foundation) founded by artists and friends of Ram Dass. The founders of the ashram, Steve and Barbara Durkee, along with two other artists collaborated on illustrating Ram Dass’ teachings from India, which would ultimately result in Be Here Now.

Ram Daas explained the production process in a 1970 lecture at the Menninger Foundation that was later published in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology:

They start with these four-foot pieces of cardboard and this book is 108 pages and each day they meditate from five to eight in the morning – there’s a group of five of them – and then all in silence … they hand rubber-stamp each page, all the letters of the page, and then the artists do all the sketching around the thing. Then the whole thing is photo-reduced and shipped to Japan where it’s printed on rice paper and hand stitched because it’s an experiential-type document.

Most of the rubber-stamp type used for of the book is one of many existing interpretations of De Vinne. The cover of the book uses what is possibly a dry-transfer version of Caslon 540 or similar (it seems a bit too clean to be rubber type, though it’s not impossible). A few other rubber type faces make occasional appearances throughout the book, including something similar to Miller & Richard’s Sans-Serif No. 6, but the De Vinne face is by far the dominant style throughout.

An online version of the book transcribes the illustrative compositions with accompanying scans.

The rare, original box set edition.

Cover of one of the hand-bound books in the original box set edition.

Interior spread from a book in the original box set edition.

Cover of the paperback edition.

Another spread from the original hand-bound box set edition.