The title page to the 1939 Penrose Annual, Volume 41 in the annual series of the publication that charted developments in printing and the graphic arts. Published by Lund Humphries of London and Bradford, West Yorkshire, the typography and binding was designed by Francis Meynell and the script lettering used for headings came from Caslon, Monotype, and Soldans.

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Just like the recently featured Begriffe-Lotto, Wir sammeln Pilze (“We gather mushrooms”) is a game issued around 1981 by VEB Plasticart Annaberg-Buchholz, produced in their Werk 4 in Karl-Marx-Stadt, the Saxon city nowadays known again as Chemnitz.

And just like Begriffe-Lotto with its mix of Cut-In and Thannhaeuser-Schrift, this board game illustrates the gamut of typographic options in East Germany at the time: body copy was to a large extent still set manually, with metal type dating back several decades, to be printed in letterpress.

Designers in the GDR strived for a greater palette. For display purposes, they found interesting contemporary faces in the offerings of the NSW, the “non-socialist economic area”, read: the capitalist West. In this case, it’s Marianna by Samoan New Zealand designer Joseph Churchward. The chubby face with forms evocative of curving mushroom heads (see also Bravado) was available from West German company Berthold Fototype and also from French press type manufacturer Mecanorma.

The insert with the rules of the game features a headline in Aktuell, created by Walther Schnippering and released by Schriftguss before the war, in 1935. The text face is the slightly younger Primus-Antiqua. Made in-house at VEB Typoart, apparently as a socialist clone of Excelsior (Linotype, 1931), it was first cast in 1950.

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