Front cover with an allegory of Historia and a title in Moderne Versalien

In 1854, three years after London’s Crystal Palace was completed, Munich proudly opened its own Glaspalast, or Glass Palace. Located in the Old Botanical Garden, it hosted dozens of major art exhibitions until its destruction in a fire in 1931 – a fate that the London model would share a few years later.

Shown here is the cover of the catalog to the annual exhibition of 1902 – and a selection of pages with adverts.

Section page for the appendix with adverts – which were handled by Rudolf Mosse. Römische Antiqua is paired with Angelus-Mediäval. The small type at the bottom is Mediäval-Egyptienne or similar.

Greif is a condensed companion to Ludwig & Mayer’s Aurora. It’s here used with various alternates, see for example the two forms for g, s, H and M. In this ad for E.A. Fleischmann’s Hof-Kunsthandlung it’s used together with Breite magere Grotesk.

The ad by Passage Schüssel features Eckmann, a typeface that was ubiquitous in German commercial printing in the first decade of the 20th century. It can here be seen with some of the accompanying Schmuck, or ornaments.

The ad for L. Bernheimer, purveyor to the Royal Bavarian court, mixes several of the aforementioned typefaces, plus Etienne schmal, Schelter & Giesecke’s Etienne, Breite magere Grotesk, a condensed sans (possibly Schelter & Giesecke’s Schmale Steinschrift which originated at Figgins), one of the many German copies of Bradley, and a couple more.

Art dealer M. Wagmüller specified Isis for the name and Römisch for everything else.

More Eckmann (here with long s (ſ)), Angelus-Mediäval, and Greif, the latter used alongside the wider Aurora – for “Photochrom”, with a CH ligature. “Maler” is in Holsatia.

Krause & Finckh promoted their Magazin für bildende Kunst with Georg Schiller’s Neudeutsch.

Back cover with more Römische Antiqua

Cover of a savings account passbook issued in 1910 by the Städtische Sparkasse München (“Municipal Savings Bank Munich”), today known as Stadtsparkasse München. The monk-like figure is the Münchner Kindl (“Munich child”) from the city’s coat of arms.

“Sparkasse” is set in Aurora, a Jugendstil sans issued by Ludwig & Mayer around 1900. Its round terminals imitate the Quellstift, a monolinear writing tool promoted by Rudolf von Larisch. “Städtische” and “München” are in Woellmer’s Breite halbfette Grotesk@ from around 1892. Zeitungs-Grotesque is used for emphasis.