#border design

Dog knight 🙏

Typography Tuesday

This week we admire the work of 20th-century type and book designer Elizabeth Friedlander as featured in Pauline Paucker’s New Borders: The Working Life of Elizabeth Friedlander printed in 1998 in an edition of 350 copies signed by the author at Graham Moss’s and Kathy Whalen’s Incline Press in Oldham, England. The book is set in Bembo, a typeface to which Friedlander made design contributions. 80 tipped-in reproductions of Friedlander’s work are included throughout the book on varying heights of paper. This unusual design is described by Patrick Fox, in his review for the Fine Press Book Association:

 . . .the text pages are 10 1/2 inches tall, but the heavier pages on which much of the illustrative material is mounted run to 12 1/8 inches. These heavier pages are sewn in with the text sheets, and guards are sewn in as well to bulk out the spine in order to avoid the book's gapping at the fore-edge.

Unfortunately, Friedlander’s legacy is not well-remembered today, but in her time she was highly regarded for her type design and borders. Born in 1903 to German-Jewish parents, she studied typography and calligraphy. Beginning her career with the German fashion magazine Die Dame, the rise of her reputation coincided with the rise of Nazi Germany, and she faced increasing persecution for her Jewish heritage. Denied a work permit, she was forced to flee Germany, and settled in London. She pressed her design skills into service for the British Political Warfare Executive, working as the sole designer for the “Black Propaganda” unit. She forged cunning replicas of Nazi ration cards and rubber stamps to be air dropped over Germany, sewing confusion. 

After the war, she remained in London, making patterned papers for Curwen and Penguin books, decorative borders for Linotype, and printer’s flowers for Monotype Corporation. She retired to Ireland in the 1960s to pursue gardening. where she died in 1984. 

Cathedral pillars/columns made of marble and organic material.