#beatrice warde

Typography Tuesday

This small letterpress broadside, printed in an edition of 100 copies by noted Chicago printer Jen Farrell at her Starshaped Press, is included in the portfolio of the deluxe edition of Parenthesis 39, the journal of the Fine Press Book Association, Fall 2020. The text is an adaptation of typography theorist Beatrice Warde's (1900-1969) famous 1932 statement, "This is a Printing Office." Farrell tweaked Warde's original text with words from Chicagoans Studs Terkel, Gwendolyn Brooks, Harold Washington, Nelson Algren, Barak Obama, Jane Addams, and Carl Sandburg.

Our issues of Parenthesis are another donation from the estate of our late friend Dennis Bayuzick.

bounded in a nutshell

some dialogue from shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, act 2, scene 2. this setting not intended for direction of players, but as display. lines set in monotype garamond italic. ſ (long-s) & its mates are set for period flavor. personae set in digital reissue of linotype garamond no. 3.  garamond no. 3 was linotype’s 1936 recutting of the «garamond» issued by american type founders corporation (atf) in 1917, morris fuller benton’s adaptation of the caractères de l'université held at the imprimerie natioanale. the original material had long since been attributed to claude garamont († 1561): it was, however, revealed in a paper by paul beaujon [beatrice warde] that the caractères de l'université were not the work of claude garamont, but later, high-quality engravings, after the style of garamont, by jean jannon of sedan, 1621. [‘The Garamond Type, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Sources Considered’, The Fleuron: A Journal of Typography, no. 5, cambridge university press, 1926].

for details of the frame composition arabesque units vide ‹a granjon arabesque›.

“The Crystal Goblet/Kryształowy Kielich”

Design of a bilingual publication with Beatrice Warde’s text. It’s supposed to work both as a booklet and a poster with most crucial quotes.

Typography Tuesday

Presented here are examples of assembled type ornaments designed by English artist, designer, and college administrator David Bethel (1923-2006) for the Monotype Corporation, including his Glint (1955), Scorpio (1958), and Blaze (1958) ornaments. The noted typography scholar and long-time marketing manager for the Monotype Corporation Beatrice Warde was a great champion of Bethel’s Glint ornaments, and even invented the Glint Game where participants try to make as many typographical arrangements with the Glint ornaments as possible. The game is still played today, and there is even a Glint Club dedicated to the pursuit of the game.

These images are from David Bethel’s article “Creating Printer’s Flowers,” published in Matrix 13, Winter 1993, pp. 103-112. The first image is a tipped-in letterpress-printed display sheet of Glint ornaments by Milwaukee-born letterpress printer and book artist Michael Tarachow, who would later publish a sample-sheet portfolio entitled The Glint Ornaments at Work and Play under his Pentagram Press imprint. The rest are type displays reproduced from the Monotype Recorder as part of the article.

Curious side note: Michael Tarachow grew up in Milwaukee and started his press here; he even worked at the UWM Library for a time. The post we did yesterday on the Dell comic book version of The Wizard of Oz was owned by Tarachow when he was a child, and was donated to us by his mother Joan Tarachow. We love when things just kind of fall into place.

Matrix 13 was printed in an edition of 925 copies by John and Rosalind Randle at the Whittington Press in England, and is a donation from our friend Jerry Buff.

View more posts from Matrix.

View other posts relating to the Whittington Press.

Typography Tuesday

JAN VAN KRIMPEN

This week we focus on the type designs of the noted Dutch type and book designer Jan van Krimpen (1892-1958) as presented in Twentieth century type designers by Rampant Lions Press proprietor Sebastian Carter, published by Taplinger Publishing Company in 1987. Van Krimpen spent nearly his entire working life at the great Haarlem printing house of Joh. Enschedé en Zonen beginning in 1923. 

His first design for Enschedé was his Lutetia in 1925 (shown here in roman, italic, and open capitals just below his portrait), named after the Roman name for Paris and cut by the German punchcutter Paul Helmuth Rädisch. This established the long working relationship between the two. In 1928 Lutetia was recut for the Monotype Corporation to van Krimpen’s specifications, also beginning a long and important relationship between van Krimpen and Monotype. Lutetia was so successful that Enschedé made van Krimpen their house designer, which he remained until his retirement in the 1950s.

Van Krimpen did accept commissions from others besides Enschedé, such as the titling for Oliver Simon’s graphic design periodical Signature (1947) and the decorated capitals for Simon at the Curwen Press (1929), shown here with van Krimpen’s Open Capitals (1928) in between. His next typeface for Enschedé was his 1928 Romanée typeface, named after an encounter with a particularly good bottle of Burgundy, for which he designed an italic over 20 years later in 1949. He produced his Romulus type face in 1931 at the suggestion of Monotype’s Beatrice Warde. It is shown here just below the Romanée in roman, italic and open capitals, along with an alternate italic, a cursive Cancelleresca Bastarda suggested by Monotype’s Stanley Morrison.

Perhaps van Krimpen’s most noted typeface is his Spectrum, originally designed for the Spectrum publishing company of Utrecht between 1941 and 1943, and later adapted for Monotype setting in 1955. Shown here also are Juliana (1952-8) and Molé Foliate (1960) designed by van Krimpen’s colleague and successor at Enschedé, Samuel Louis (Sem) Hartz, although there is some dispute over how much credit Hartz should get for the Molé Foliate, as another colleague Pieter Wetselaar appears to have had a considerable hand in its design. The portrait of Jan van Krimpen shown here is by Sem Hartz.

View our other posts about  Enschedé and Jan van Krimpen.

View another post from Twentieth century type designers.

belle sauvage (bootleg block)

print from a block purchased in a market at st  james’s church, piccadilly, london—best i could get it to print. the original image was engraved by eric gill & know as Belle Sauvage. the model was gill’s mistress of the moment, the typographical scholar beatrice warde. warde made an important discovery concerning the garamond types—vide ‹bounded in a nutshell›.  the original Belle Sauvage wood cut appeared on the title-page of gill’s Art Nonsense [cassell & co, london, 1929], which was also the first commercial showing of his perpetua types—vide ‹eric gill on typography›.

ABC by Geoffrey Chaucer (1934) ABC by Geoffrey Chaucer (1934)[Eleanor] Joyce Francis Chapbook, softcover sewn. H250 x W170 mm. 16 pages. Edition of 500? Acquired from Antiquariaat Fokas Holthuis, 30 April 2021.Photos: Emilia Osztafi.* Chaucer’s ABC (ca. 1369) is an intriguing early work in the history of abecedaries. There are alphabet poems in the Hebrew Bible, but according to the artists’…