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.

The Holländer Hof is a hotel in Heidelberg’s Old Town, located directly at the Old Bridge across the Neckar. There is evidence of an inn on this site as early as the late 16th century. The current name – “the Dutch(man’s) Inn” was introduced by Louis Spitz in 1836, as Dutch boatsmen and travellers formed the majority of the guests at the time.

The vinyl letters on the window above the entrance are from Claudius, or Claudius-Fraktur, a typeface based on calligraphic samples by Rudolf Koch. His son Paul finished a first cut in the early 1930s and used it in the printing workshop that he ran together with his sister Ursula in the Haus zum Fürsteneck. Further cuts were added by the Klingspor foundry, and the typeface released in 1937 – three years after Rudolf Koch had died. The typeface is named after the German poet Matthias Claudius.

Oriol Miró points out that the t was dully manipulated, compare to the specimen below. The lettering could date from around 1981, when the building was reopened as a hotel after extensive renovation work, having previously served as a Christian hospice.

Preliminary proof for a specimen of Claudius-Fraktur, showing the full character set of the metal foundry type in the 40 pt (Didot) size, handset by Farida Sunada of Ophelia Press and printed by Gerald Lange of the Bieler Press

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

For your typographic holiday reading, here’s a find from a flea market in Berlin-Schöneberg.

Lieder zur Weihnachtszeit (“Songs for Christmastide”) was published by Georg Kallmeyer Verlag in 1940. Despite the poor condition, it looked like a charming booklet on first sight. The title on the cover is lettering by Hans Voigt. The typeface used throughout the book is a Fraktur that Paul Koch first cut in 1933 in a single size for his Werkstatt Haus Fürsteneck in Frankfurt, based on letterforms written by his father, Rudolf Koch. In 1937, three years after Rudolf Koch’s death, the Gebrüder Klingspor type foundry made it commercially available in a range of sizes as Claudius. Here it is combined with a typeface for musical notation also cut by Koch Jr. Nicely printed in red and black, the song book is enriched with illustrations by Heinrich Pauser, another artist of the Haus zum Fürsteneck workshop and a student of Koch Sr.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Illustrations are credited to Heinrich Pauser, who also designed typefaces. His debut, Semper-Antiqua, was released the same year. The pen script Petra followed in 1954. The booklet was printed by August Osterrieth.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

The table of contents reveals that the numerals in Claudius are not tabular.

As soon as one starts reading, one is painfully reminded that the heyday of this workshop in the tradition of the Arts and Crafts movement coincided with Nazism, and that its members allowed those in power to coopt their talents for propaganda purposes. As beautiful as Claudius and the two-colored musical notation might be, the joy is spoiled by the content which is drenched in the unholy zeitgeist.

Editor Ilse Lang’s foreword was written on Christmas 1939, only a few months after Nazi Germany had invaded Poland and started the Second World War. The introductory text vaguely hints at the war (“the moving events of our day”), and the cultural revolution of the first years of the Third Reich (“all the songs that have been created over the past few years in addition to the old familiar ones, songs that will gradually feel equally familiar to us”). For a compilation of Christmas songs, there are indeed exceptionally few references to the biblical nativity story, or Christian elements in general. “Gott” (God) and “Engel” (angel) appear only twice, and are outnumbered by terms like “Stern” (star), “Licht” (light), “Nacht” (night), “Feuer” (fire), “Wald” (woods), etc. Santa Claus is replaced by a pagan “Sunnwendmann” (Solstice man). Instead of Mary, there is “Frau Holle” (Mother Hulda). And there certainly is not a single mention of the Jewish baby named Jesus.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

The notes with square heads are printed black on red staves. Hans Reichardt lists Paul Koch’s typeface for musical notation in his pdf for the Klingspor Museum simply as “Musiknoten”. Koch wrote about this topic in articles for Imprimatur (“Neugestaltung des Notenbildes in Handschrift und Druck”, 1933) and Klimschs Jahrbuch (“Die Musiknoten im Buchdruck”, 1940).

Several of the included carols are by Nazi songwriter Hans Baumann who also wrote “Es zittern die morschen Knochen” (“The frail bones tremble”), the official marching song of the Reichsarbeitsdienst. In “Kind, die Sterne gehen weit” he prepares the German youth for the deprivations of the war years to come and calls for soldierly obedience: “Once you grow up you will need strong hands to master the hardships. A cold home and hard bread – stop asking questions.” His “Hohe Nacht der klaren Sterne” is a prime example for the new carols of the 1930s that should replace Christian songs like “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht” (“Silent Night”). Its success was based on the fact that it brought together key concepts of Nazi ideology such as “nature mysticism, mother cult and new birth” (Esther Gajek, see Michael Fischer’s entry in liederlexikon.de) without being clumsily obtrusive. In fact, the song continued to be popular after the collapse of Nazi Germany and is still sometimes performed in the modern day. The booklet ends on a belligerent note. “Gar fröhlich zu singen” (“To be sung gleefully”) predicts what to expect from the new year: “Viel Kampf, Heil und Segen und Arbeit fürwahr” (“Much fighting, salvation, blessings, and labor for sure.”) If you want to read more about Christmas in the Nazi regime, I recommend Faith Thomas’ feature for DW Online.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

It used to be common to mark omitted double letters with an overbar, especially for ‘mm’ and ‘nn’. These abbreviations come in handy when lyrics have to match the musical notes, see “da kom[m]t er her”.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

The second line features an oddity of German orthography as used until the reform of 1996. When words are hyphenated at the ‘ck’ digraph, the spelling changes to ‘k-k’ (Brücken → Brük-ken).

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Like most metal typefaces, Claudius has compact umlauts with integrated dots (or strokes), see “Äpfel”. It comes with a number of ligatures, some of which can be observed here (ch ck ſi ſſ ſt). See the full glyph set on Gerald Lange’s Flickr page.

A rather short, but jolly fellow came into my shop yesterday — said that he needed some of these quickly. He had no cash, but promised to put something under my tree tomorrow. Nice enough guy, but he kept saying ho, ho, ho every few words, which kind of got old. Has anyone had dealings with this guy before?