Dan Reynolds

This is the sixth and main chapter of my doctoral dissertation, written at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig and defended in January 2019. The PDF uploaded here also include the whole book’s extended image captions (starting on p. 508) and bibliography (starting on p. 520).

This is the second chapter of my doctoral dissertation, written at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig and defended in January 2019.

The abstract for the entire book is as follows:
The visual appearances for most of the letterpress-printing typefaces published in Germany during the twentieth century are attributed to specific designers. Typefoundries, or the firms who manufactured those products, presented them as collaborations between individual artists and themselves as corporate entities. Only on rare occasions were the internal workers within the firms who produced the final forms of the products ever mentioned by name in publications about them, unlike the typefaces’ designers; however, from the earliest surviving drawings prepared by those typefaces’ designers, as well as from their written accounts about the type-design and type-making processes, it is clear that the work they submitted to the foundries could not have been implemented exactly as-is. In this research, I have analysed German typefounding in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the surviving process and production drawings made for products, as well as through accounts written by participants involved in these steps. The typefaces for which accounts have survived only represent a small fraction of those mentioned in the history that follows. To form that narrative, I have used a synecdochic approach, relying on these parts to describe the industry as a whole.

A typefoundry’s products did not necessarily all originate in-house; but inside of the firms who did collaborate with external designers, the initiative to do so must have come from the respective company owners and directors, who would have believed that products based on the work of external contributors could prove financially successful, enabling their businesses to grow, and strengthening their “corporate identities” or reputations. The various foundry owners and directors who did this may have been influenced by one another, but by 1900, it was not uncommon in German industrial manufacturing for businesses to collaborate with external artists and designers in this manner. Not all of the individuals who foundries collaborated with were “artists and designers;” for example, some were academics with experience reading and writing other scripts. Nevertheless, all collaborators must have been able to offer foundries knowledge that they did not already have institutionally, be that linguistic or stylistic. Many collaborating designers would not have been aware of the exact details regarding typeface manufacturing; they were not “insiders” in the process, and could only have been responsible for part of a product’s final design. In some cases, I believe it was more likely that the firms’ punchcutter employees were the ones responsible for bringing the products to their final forms, instead of the external designers or foundry owners, directors, and other staff members. Yet at roughly the same time that the foundries were beginning to ascribe product authorship to specific individuals, these craftsmen – who as a professional group had been physically responsible for sculpting each typographic character to appear in print for centuries – were becoming redundant. New type-making machinery introduced from the 1870s onward helped to make them obsolete. Punchcutters were not part of typefoundries’ twentieth-century brand identities, even though they were integral employees within the organisations.

By collaborating with external designers for the design of new printing types, rather than continuing to entrust these entirely to their internal type-making staff, German typefoundries supported the development of a new professional activity during the early years of the graphic design profession: typeface design. The work that external designers performed unfolded in an environment where it had already become commonplace for the manufacturers of various goods to entrust the appearance of their products to “designers,” a new professional denomination primarily made up of individuals trained in art academies or arts and crafts schools (Kunst­gewerbeschulen). Many type designers also came from that milieu. Some of the individuals who designed printing types during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also designed books and magazines, as well as tables and chairs, tea services and wine glasses – even whole buildings. During that time, most of the type-making workers inside of the foundries were anonymous to customers; they are also mostly anonymous to historians who investigated them later, including myself. Their anonymity was a result of the work they performed not being considered “worth mentioning;” it was just handwork, not art or design. Despite the individual craftsmen working inside typefoundries not being seen at the time as “authors” or “coauthors” of the final products, their potential contributions should be added into future explanations of typefaces’ origins. I hope that my research will cause other writers to use a more nuanced phraseology when it comes to the authorship of industrial-era foundry types’ designs. This kind of more-detailed specification may also be applicable to other industrial goods produced in Germany during its Imperial period, as well as to many of the typefaces produced in Germany and in other countries after 1914.

I gathered the new information presented below, both so that it could be published for the first time, as well as to prevent its being forgotten; it should remain visible for future generations of designers and design historians to access. My findings may help enrich the design history discipline’s understanding of the type-designing and type-making practices in operation within industrial typefounding in imperial Germany, explaining why German typefoundries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began to collaborate with external artists and designers, instead of continuing to develop new products entirely in-house.

This is the second chapter of my doctoral dissertation, written at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig and defended in January 2019.

The abstract for the entire book is as follows:
The visual appearances for most of the letterpress-printing typefaces published in Germany during the twentieth century are attributed to specific designers. Typefoundries, or the firms who manufactured those products, presented them as collaborations between individual artists and themselves as corporate entities. Only on rare occasions were the internal workers within the firms who produced the final forms of the products ever mentioned by name in publications about them, unlike the typefaces’ designers; however, from the earliest surviving drawings prepared by those typefaces’ designers, as well as from their written accounts about the type-design and type-making processes, it is clear that the work they submitted to the foundries could not have been implemented exactly as-is. In this research, I have analysed German typefounding in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the surviving process and production drawings made for products, as well as through accounts written by participants involved in these steps. The typefaces for which accounts have survived only represent a small fraction of those mentioned in the history that follows. To form that narrative, I have used a synecdochic approach, relying on these parts to describe the industry as a whole.

A typefoundry’s products did not necessarily all originate in-house; but inside of the firms who did collaborate with external designers, the initiative to do so must have come from the respective company owners and directors, who would have believed that products based on the work of external contributors could prove financially successful, enabling their businesses to grow, and strengthening their “corporate identities” or reputations. The various foundry owners and directors who did this may have been influenced by one another, but by 1900, it was not uncommon in German industrial manufacturing for businesses to collaborate with external artists and designers in this manner. Not all of the individuals who foundries collaborated with were “artists and designers;” for example, some were academics with experience reading and writing other scripts. Nevertheless, all collaborators must have been able to offer foundries knowledge that they did not already have institutionally, be that linguistic or stylistic. Many collaborating designers would not have been aware of the exact details regarding typeface manufacturing; they were not “insiders” in the process, and could only have been responsible for part of a product’s final design. In some cases, I believe it was more likely that the firms’ punchcutter employees were the ones responsible for bringing the products to their final forms, instead of the external designers or foundry owners, directors, and other staff members. Yet at roughly the same time that the foundries were beginning to ascribe product authorship to specific individuals, these craftsmen – who as a professional group had been physically responsible for sculpting each typographic character to appear in print for centuries – were becoming redundant. New type-making machinery introduced from the 1870s onward helped to make them obsolete. Punchcutters were not part of typefoundries’ twentieth-century brand identities, even though they were integral employees within the organisations.

By collaborating with external designers for the design of new printing types, rather than continuing to entrust these entirely to their internal type-making staff, German typefoundries supported the development of a new professional activity during the early years of the graphic design profession: typeface design. The work that external designers performed unfolded in an environment where it had already become commonplace for the manufacturers of various goods to entrust the appearance of their products to “designers,” a new professional denomination primarily made up of individuals trained in art academies or arts and crafts schools (Kunst­gewerbeschulen). Many type designers also came from that milieu. Some of the individuals who designed printing types during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also designed books and magazines, as well as tables and chairs, tea services and wine glasses – even whole buildings. During that time, most of the type-making workers inside of the foundries were anonymous to customers; they are also mostly anonymous to historians who investigated them later, including myself. Their anonymity was a result of the work they performed not being considered “worth mentioning;” it was just handwork, not art or design. Despite the individual craftsmen working inside typefoundries not being seen at the time as “authors” or “coauthors” of the final products, their potential contributions should be added into future explanations of typefaces’ origins. I hope that my research will cause other writers to use a more nuanced phraseology when it comes to the authorship of industrial-era foundry types’ designs. This kind of more-detailed specification may also be applicable to other industrial goods produced in Germany during its Imperial period, as well as to many of the typefaces produced in Germany and in other countries after 1914.

I gathered the new information presented below, both so that it could be published for the first time, as well as to prevent its being forgotten; it should remain visible for future generations of designers and design historians to access. My findings may help enrich the design history discipline’s understanding of the type-designing and type-making practices in operation within industrial typefounding in imperial Germany, explaining why German typefoundries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began to collaborate with external artists and designers, instead of continuing to develop new products entirely in-house.

This is the first chapter of my doctoral dissertation, written at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig and defended in January 2019. The PDF includes my dissertation’s front matter and table of contents, etc.

The abstract for the entire book is as follows:
The visual appearances for most of the letterpress-printing typefaces published in Germany during the twentieth century are attributed to specific designers. Typefoundries, or the firms who manufactured those products, presented them as collaborations between individual artists and themselves as corporate entities. Only on rare occasions were the internal workers within the firms who produced the final forms of the products ever mentioned by name in publications about them, unlike the typefaces’ designers; however, from the earliest surviving drawings prepared by those typefaces’ designers, as well as from their written accounts about the type-design and type-making processes, it is clear that the work they submitted to the foundries could not have been implemented exactly as-is. In this research, I have analysed German typefounding in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the surviving process and production drawings made for products, as well as through accounts written by participants involved in these steps. The typefaces for which accounts have survived only represent a small fraction of those mentioned in the history that follows. To form that narrative, I have used a synecdochic approach, relying on these parts to describe the industry as a whole.

A typefoundry’s products did not necessarily all originate in-house; but inside of the firms who did collaborate with external designers, the initiative to do so must have come from the respective company owners and directors, who would have believed that products based on the work of external contributors could prove financially successful, enabling their businesses to grow, and strengthening their “corporate identities” or reputations. The various foundry owners and directors who did this may have been influenced by one another, but by 1900, it was not uncommon in German industrial manufacturing for businesses to collaborate with external artists and designers in this manner. Not all of the individuals who foundries collaborated with were “artists and designers;” for example, some were academics with experience reading and writing other scripts. Nevertheless, all collaborators must have been able to offer foundries knowledge that they did not already have institutionally, be that linguistic or stylistic. Many collaborating designers would not have been aware of the exact details regarding typeface manufacturing; they were not “insiders” in the process, and could only have been responsible for part of a product’s final design. In some cases, I believe it was more likely that the firms’ punchcutter employees were the ones responsible for bringing the products to their final forms, instead of the external designers or foundry owners, directors, and other staff members. Yet at roughly the same time that the foundries were beginning to ascribe product authorship to specific individuals, these craftsmen – who as a professional group had been physically responsible for sculpting each typographic character to appear in print for centuries – were becoming redundant. New type-making machinery introduced from the 1870s onward helped to make them obsolete. Punchcutters were not part of typefoundries’ twentieth-century brand identities, even though they were integral employees within the organisations.

By collaborating with external designers for the design of new printing types, rather than continuing to entrust these entirely to their internal type-making staff, German typefoundries supported the development of a new professional activity during the early years of the graphic design profession: typeface design. The work that external designers performed unfolded in an environment where it had already become commonplace for the manufacturers of various goods to entrust the appearance of their products to “designers,” a new professional denomination primarily made up of individuals trained in art academies or arts and crafts schools (Kunst­gewerbeschulen). Many type designers also came from that milieu. Some of the individuals who designed printing types during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also designed books and magazines, as well as tables and chairs, tea services and wine glasses – even whole buildings. During that time, most of the type-making workers inside of the foundries were anonymous to customers; they are also mostly anonymous to historians who investigated them later, including myself. Their anonymity was a result of the work they performed not being considered “worth mentioning;” it was just handwork, not art or design. Despite the individual craftsmen working inside typefoundries not being seen at the time as “authors” or “coauthors” of the final products, their potential contributions should be added into future explanations of typefaces’ origins. I hope that my research will cause other writers to use a more nuanced phraseology when it comes to the authorship of industrial-era foundry types’ designs. This kind of more-detailed specification may also be applicable to other industrial goods produced in Germany during its Imperial period, as well as to many of the typefaces produced in Germany and in other countries after 1914.

I gathered the new information presented below, both so that it could be published for the first time, as well as to prevent its being forgotten; it should remain visible for future generations of designers and design historians to access. My findings may help enrich the design history discipline’s understanding of the type-designing and type-making practices in operation within industrial typefounding in imperial Germany, explaining why German typefoundries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began to collaborate with external artists and designers, instead of continuing to develop new products entirely in-house.

In the second volume of his Manuel Typographique, published in 1766, Pierre Simon Fournier le jeune claimed that he had built the first typefoundry whose products represented a common artistic vision. Fournier’s contemporary, the Leipzig printer, publisher, and typefounder Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf agreed with him, as he made clear in the 1777 essay appearing for the first time in English translation below. Breitkopf believed that Fournier had built the best European typefoundry so far, both because of the quality of his designs as well as its products all being the work of a single artist. Breitkopf did not write his panegyric without cause; his praise of Fournier is an instrument with which he critiques the 1768 type specimen catalogue produced by the Joh. Enschedé en Zonen printing and typefounding house in Haarlem. Enschedé’s typefoundry was assembled from the contributions of multiple punchcutters, and their most-recent typefaces were cut by Joan Michaël Fleischman, a German punchcutter trained in Nuremberg who had spent most of his career in the Netherlands. Despite Fleischman and Fournier having each been dead for almost a decade by the time of Breitkopf’s essay, Breitkopf and Fournier had been acquainted with one another. For example, Breitkopf had been a customer of Fournier’s, but they could also be seen as collaborators. According to Harry Carter, the information about several of the European typefoundries that Fournier presented in the Manuel Typographique had been provided to him by Breitkopf. Fournier even requested that Breitkopf compose “the formes for the pages of flemish, fraktur, schwabacher, german script … samaritan, syriac, arabic, coptic, armenian, and ethiopian” for the Manuel Typographique with the Breitkopf foundry’s types, and then for him to send these from Leipzig. While Breitkopf did not mention his relationship with Fournier in the essay, its tone reads like that of a man defending the legacy of a friend.

For the past 121 years, the Akzidenz-Grotesk typeface has been available for use in design and printing. The regular weight of the family was the first to be published; the H. Berthold AG typefoundry in Berlin, and their Stuttgart-based subsidiary Bauer & Co., brought it to market in 1898. A hundred years later, in a lecture at TYPO Berlin 1998, Berthold’s long-time artistic director Günter Gerhard Lange attributed Akzidenz-Grotesk’s design to Ferdinand Theinhardt, a punchcutter and Berlin typefoundry owner who lived from 1820 until 1906. Lange provided Yvonne Schwemmer-Scheddin with more details about his proposed attribution, as part of a long interview about his own life’s work that was published in Typografische Monatsblätter in 2003. There, he stated that Akzidenz-Grotesk had grown out of a typeface called Royal-Grotesk, which he alleged had been cut by Theinhardt for the Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin. Unfortunately, many of Lange’s details regarding both Royal-Grotesk and Ferdinand Theinhardt were incorrect. Neither Akzidenz-Grotesk nor Royal-Grotesk were created for the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences. They were not cut by Ferdinand Theinhardt, and the typefaces did not originate at his foundry after his departure from it in the mid-1880s, either.

Wir durften uns im Klingspor Museum Offenbach und im Linotype Archiv in Bad Homburg umsehen und haben dabei das eine oder andere interessante Stück gefunden. Dan Reynolds, Typedesigner bei Linotype, hat diese Strecke zusammengestellt und erläutert die Abbildungen.

Deutsch: Eine historisch-kritische Ausgabe zu publizieren, ist nicht nur eine wissenschaftliche, sondern auch eine typografische und technische Herausforderung. Vom Einfluss der Technik auf das Editionsprojekt der Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe berichtete Dan Reynolds auf dem Symposium «Schrift/Macht/Welten. Typografie und Macht», das im Mainzer Gutenberg-Museum als Schlusspunkt zur Ausstellung «On Type. Texte zur Typografie» stattfand.

English: Not only do historical-critical editions pose scientific challenges for publishers, they also raise typographic and technical question. I originally wrote the article in the PDF shown here in German, in 2012. In 2018, I created an English version of the article on my website. You can read that version, if you prefer, at http://www.typeoff.de/2018/09/albert-kapr-and-the-complete-works-of-marx-and-engels/

The long nineteenth century had three significant periods of experimentation with hybrid roman/blackletter types. In the 1790s, Unger’s Berlin printing house and Breitkopf’s in Leipzig each predicted new Fraktur types whose letters included structural elements that until that point had not been part of the Fraktur canon. These types were intended for text-setting, and were not widely adopted. The second phase, in the 1840s–’60s, was characterised by display types that combined blackletter and roman elements together within individual letterforms. Lastly, the fin de siècle saw the creation of the first so-called “artistic types.” Many of these were hybrids with letters drawn in three different styles – blackletter, roman, and uncial – all combined together into single alphabets. This paper concerns itself with a series of typefaces from the second period, which I classify as the “Midollines.”

German design historians define nineteenth-century designers as individuals who created drawings determining new products’ appearances, but were not involved in their production. By this definition, a designer would not have even been required to understood the processes behind a product’s manufacture. Following in that line, Jean Midolle could be considered the first type designer in German-speaking Europe, despite his almost certainly having been unaware that Eduard Haenel’s typefoundry in Berlin used a page from a pattern book of his as a design source. Born in or near Besançon during the Première République, Midolle’s career as a calligrapher and illuminator took him to Belfort, Geneva, Strasbourg, and Belgium – among other places. The lettering sample in question was published by Frédéric Emile Simon in a 1834/35 portfolio of Midolle’s, the Spécimen des écritures modernes.

This paper explains how Haenel’s Midolline typeface quickly inspired a new category of nineteenth-century type classification and became a term printers briefly used as shorthand for all roman/blackletter hybrids. I shall also address the Midolline phenomenon, by which ten loosely related type designs were distributed across dozens of foundries in the western world during the second half of the nineteenth century, from St. Louis in the United States to St. Petersburg in Russia, from Edinburgh and Oslo in the north to Vienna in the south. Unlike the other blackletter/roman hybrids of their time, such as the Schoch types or the Central-Schrift, the Midollines were a long-lasting phenomenon.

Although Germany had the most thriving typefounding industry on mainland Europe in 1900, the making of letterforms was not part of their typical design education. This changed by the 1920s, when courses on calligraphy or lettering were part of almost every academy or trade school’s curriculum. While much impetus was provided by the work of William Morris and Edward Johnston in England, the changes would not have been implemented without designer–educators like Peter Behrens, F.H. Ehmcke, Rudolf von Larisch and Anna Simons. As with Johnston’s method, the broad pen was the preferred instrument in most of cases. This paper shall track the spread of the broad pen in German design education during the years leading up to the First World War, as well as its results in German type foundry output from the same period.

German design historians define 19th-century designers as artists who created drawings determining new products’ appearances, but were not involved in their production. They may not have even understood the process behind those products’ manufacture. By this definition, Jean Midolle may be Germany’s first type designer, although he was almost certainly unaware that Eduard Haenel’s typefoundry in Berlin used a page from a pattern book of his as a design source. This presentation will explain how Haenel’s “Midolline” typeface quickly inspired a new category of 19th-century type classification and became a term printers briefly used as shorthand for all roman/blackletter hybrids. I shall also address the “Midolline” phenomenon, by which nine loosely related type designs were distributed across dozens of foundries in the western world during the second half of the 19th century, from Prague to St. Louis, and Edinburgh to Vienna. Jean Midolle the man was born in or near Burgundy in Revolutionary France. Among other places, his career took him to Geneva and Strasbourg before his trail goes cold in Belgium, where he may have died. With this presentation, I hope to encourage researchers to uncover more details of his work there.

In Leipzig wurde 1905 an der Königlichen Akademie für graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe (heute: Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst / HGB) eine eigene Schriftklasse etabliert. Diese fokussierte die Anwendung und Schaffung neuer Schriften vor allem für buchgewerbliche Zwecke, um die Qualität des Designs von Drucksachen zu verbessern. Mit der späteren Gründung des Instituts für Buchkunst (1955) an der HGB kam ein weiterer Fokus hinzu. Am Institut entstanden künftig die Schriftentwürfe für den VEB Typoart, den einzigen Schrifthersteller der DDR. Unter der Leitung von Prof. Albert Kapr (1918–1995) entwickelte sich die Zusammenarbeit zwischen dem Institut für Buchkunst und dem VEB Typoart über Jahrzehnte in historischer Einmaligkeit. Diese Art der Kooperation zwischen Hochschule und Gewerbe bieten noch heute Ansätze für die aktuelle Praxis.

Despite the provocative title, this presentation’s theme does not center on the transition from metal type to photo-typesetting. Instead, it investigates changes in both the design and production of typefaces from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. Many conference attendees will already be familiar with two technological innovations from the nineteenth century that allowed matrices to be manufactured without steel punches first being cut (electrotyping and pantographic-engraving machines). This paper proposes that a third factor would increasingly limit the decision-making role punchcutters performed in the type-manufacturing process: the invention of photography and its adoption as a working aid by typefoundries. While photography would not yet make punchcutting redundant, the author is of the opinion that typefoundries would likely have never undergone extensive collaboration with external designers without the ability to reduce and reproduce working drawings. How many of the iconic typefaces of the twentieth century ever would have appeared without this step having been put into place? While the primary focus here rests on German typefoundries, examples from other countries are also drawn upon. This paper presents elements for the first time from the author’s ongoing doctoral research at the Braunschweig University of Art.

Is the term “type design” appropriate for the work of pre-industrial punchcutters? All objects produced throughout history have undoubtedly been designed; however, many industrial design historians have abandoned this term for describing objects preceding the Industrial Revolution. In his ongoing research into Wilhelmine type, Dan attempts to arrive at a definition of type design adequately fitting typefoundries’ internal processes. This is often at odds with their own self-presentation, or the reports of early typographic historians. Norms and standards are common features of industrialisation. German typefounders adopted a number of these in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; from the point of view of designers today, the Universal Baseline may be the most controversial. While they do not seem to have caused designer-frustration on the level Monotype’s unit system later vexed Jan van Krimpen, Germany’s low baselines must have affected the reception of German type abroad. Even Walter Tracy’s brief critique of early 20th century German romans must be partially grounded by the short descenders mandated for certain type sizes.

This is the video from my talk at the TPtalks series, organized as part of TypeParis 2019. In it, I discuss my ongoing research into the distribution of specific sans serif typeface design through German-speaking typefoundries during the 19th century.

Im Laufe des 19. Jahrhunderts operierten im deutschsprachigen Raum etwa 100 verschiedene Schriftgießereien. Sie stellten ihre Produkte nicht als einzigartige künstlerische Schöpfungen vor, wie es im 20. Jahrhundert üblich würde. Zusammen mit einigen weiteren technischen und wirtschaftlichen Bedingungen trug dies dazu bei, dass Einzigartigkeit kein allzu großes Merkmal des damaligen Gewerbes war; die Überschneidung von Produkten in den Schriftproben ist selbst bei oberflächlichen Vergleichen von Schriftgießerei-Katalogen sichtbar.
Als neue Schriftgattung entstand die Grotesk, also die serifenlose Schrift, erst in dieser Zeit. Bis ins frühe 20. Jahrhundert wurden sie deutlich weniger häufig als Fraktur und alle Arten von Antiqua-Schriften in Druckwerken eingesetzt. Wie viele Grotesk-Schriften gab es also im 19. Jahrhundert bei den deutschsprachigen Schriftgießereien überhaupt? In einem laufenden Forschungsprojekt, dessen erste Ergebnisse im Rahmen des Vortrags vorgestellt werden sollen, bereite ich einen nahezu kompletten Überblick vor. Dieser möchte weitere Erkenntnisse über den Austausch zwischen den verschiedenen Unternehmen im Gewerbe ermöglichen und unser Verständnis darüber vertiefen, was die genaue Bedeutung kommerzieller Schriftentwürfe als Handelsware damals war.

Most of the typefaces published by German-speaking foundries around 1850 had descriptive names. These referred to commonly-understood styles of letters. Unlike other mid-nineteenth-century foundry products, the Midolline typeface from Eduard Haenel’s Berlin printing house referenced the name of an artist. Most nineteenth and twentieth-century German-language typographic authors attributed Midolline’s design to the French artist Jean Midolle, implying collaboration between a typefoundry and an external designer decades before such relationships became commonplace. This is the first paper to definitively attribute Midolline to a specific typefoundry and a list of potential punchcutters.