Rudolf von Larisch seventieth birthday wishes

We don’t really know the story of this one. What follows has a fact or two followed by some educated-but-potentially-misleading guesses.

Google Translate suggests that this is a birthday greeting for Rudolf von Larisch, the important Austrian calligrapher, editor, and type designer. Von Larisch would have turned 70 on April 1, 1926, which means this was most likely printed in that year. In 1926, Rudolf Koch would have been 49—and the Koch Antiqua caps (1922) in this piece would have been still new(ish).

We can’t tell if the heavier weight cap E used to augment some cap Us were semibold (1924) or bold (1926). Von Larisch and Koch certainly knew one another. Was this a gift from the latter to the former? We can’t say. Maybe this is just a thing printed by someone who had this type. But what we can say is that this appears to be a proof, marked up with spacing notations, so it probably never made it to its intended recipient (unless Von Larisch marked this up after getting it).

Now, how about those red and yellow hand embellishments? They sure look like the sort of crosses that one would see from the Offenbach Workshop. But a cross is not a complex structure and we aren’t authorities on Koch or his hand. So, we asked Dorothee Ader at the Klingspor Museum and Dan Reynolds who knows a lot, too. We trust them. Neither knew this piece or was convinced it was by Koch or his workshop. Dan pointed us to the greeting Koch made for Von Larisch’s 75th. So, all we can say for sure is that this was made for Von Larisch and it is a beautiful thing.