“A happy and prosperous New Year 1961” card

You don’t know who Uli Huber is. Or, was. He’s dead. He was born on August 3, 1902, making him a Leo (if you care about such things). He died in 1981, but before that, he spent his entire career as a graphic designer in Germany, working on posters, packaging, advertisements, logos, and one published postage stamp. None of the companies he worked for had much of an international presence, so his work never really made it to the States. The handful of articles about him are in German. His one book, Werbung + Graphik (Advertising + Graphics) written with Eugen Johannes Maecker, is also in German. It looks interesting, but we can’t read it. A tribute book was published in 1969 when he retired from teaching at the State Teaching Institute for Graphics, Printing and Advertising in Berlin. Google translated it for us but we didn’t learn much–except that he’d been a student of F. H. Ernst Schneidler, one of the twentieth century’s great teachers of lettering and typography, and that “[h]e was tolerant even towards things that he rejected for himself because he saw the good in them.” So, a typical Leo. (Just kidding. We have no idea what Leos are known for. Don’t tell us. We do not care.)

Here’s Huber, though, sending out greetings for a happy and prosperous 1961 in four different languages. The little bit of type is set in Georg Trump’s Schadow. In the middle are two screen-printed figures he drew by hand and presented in two different directions. He was taking advantage of the fact that 19 can be can rotated 180 degrees and read as 61. (ChatGPT calls 1961 a “rotational mirror twin.” Google, however, doesn’t acknowledge the existence of such a thing.) The next time one would be able to pull of the trick of drawing just two numbers to write one year that has a kind of rotational symmetry is in the year 6009. See you then.