Bäckerei Paul
This small bakery in the Altstadt or “old town” area of Heusenstamm – population just 18,500 – has an exterior sign made with Walthari. Since Heusenstamm is in the Landkreis Offenbach (the “rural district” of the German state of Hessen just outside of Offenbach am Main), this is not so surprising. Walthari was published by the Rudhard’sche Gießerei in 1899, the Offenbach-based typefoundry that had been purchased by Carl Klingspor in 1892, which his sons Karl and Wilhelm renamed Gebr. Klingspor in 1906. Walthari was one of the first Künstlerschriften or “artistic typefaces” that Karl Klingspor published. That famous series of typefaces included Eckmann, the Behrens-Schrift, Liturgisch, Tiemann-Mediaeval, the Deutsche Schrift, and Hupp-Fraktur, etc. And those were in addition to the many fonts of ornaments, borders, and printing vignettes the firm published – almost all of which were designed by artists then as famous or even more well-known in printing circles than König, Eckmann, Behrens, Hupp, Tiemann, and Koch.
I don’t know how old the sign is, and since I passed by the bakery on Sunday, it was closed and I could not ask. But I suspect it to be relatively recent, and probably made with a free-front version of Walthari.
1 Comment on “Bäckerei Paul”
The sign can’t be any older than 1992. That’s the year when Mike Allard made his digitization of Walthari named Perry Gothic. It’s a typical 1990s freebie, with minimal character set and despicable outlines. If you zoom into the photo, you can see some of its defects, e.g. the dents in the left inner curves in a and u, or the flat segment in the left outer curve of e. Dieter Steffmann’s Augusta (2000) and Typo-Graf’s Berry Rotunda (2016) both are derived from Perry Gothic. They add accented characters, but didn’t fix the poor outlines. Since Perry Gothic doesn’t have umlauts and Berry Rotunda’s dieresis are angled, my bet is that this is Augusta. Out of the box, however, its umlaut dots are bigger. The type on the sign looks like it was additionally stretched. For better digital versions of Heinz König’s typeface, see Waltari by Tom Wallace (HiH, 2008) and Gerhard Helzel’s digitization under the original name (2010).