#gothic type

Typography Tuesday

This week, a little bit of Gothic with The Gothic Script of the Middle Ages by H. C. Schulz, printed in San Francisco by the Grabhorn Press in an edition of 71 copies for the publisher and first bibliographer of the Grabhorn Press David Magee in 1939. The type used is Fred Goudy's Deepdene Text, a blackletter typeface designed in the early 1930s to complement his humanist Deepdene typeface designed earlier. The two typefaces are not otherwise related in style. The book is printed in red, black, and blue, with a lovely gold-leaf initial T in the opening text.

This volume is a "leaf book": a book with content centered on the content of another book, or type of book, with a sample leaf from that other book included in the volume. In this case, a leaf from a late 14th-century manuscript Collectar is included in the publication. We don't know who H. C. Schulz is, but judging from the several other leaf books he produced with the Grabhorn Press, he must have been a collector and authority on manuscript books. Unfortunately, he also seems to have been a breaker of books, or at best a collector of broken books, which in turn encourages the breaking of books.

Schulz describes the leaf included here as made "probably in Northern France" and that "The writing is a very bold Gothic script in the best liturgical tradition, and a contrast to its heaviness is given by the fine pen ornamentation of the initials." Our copy of The Gothic Script of the Middle Ages is part of a gift from the estate of our dear friend Dennis Bayuzick.  

View other books from the collection of Dennis Bayuzick. 

Another entry for our “dragons and unicorns” week: Two unicorns hold up a crest decorated with two more little unicorns, again from Constitutiones provinciales ecclesiae Anglicanae.

2 November 2023 | Der Klubhaus

Check out " Cinder " by Autumn in Helen hey lick on video link for more info!!!!:-) Sweet beautiful days inheart💗💗

Typography Tuesday

SCHWABACHER

Not all Gothic typefaces are the same, and there were several distinctive designs that were used in the early years of printing. While similar to the rounded Rotunda Gothic, Schwabacher is more angular and has certain distinctive letter designs, such as in the capitals A and H. It was perhaps the most common typeface in Germany until Fraktur supplanted it by the mid-16th century.

The name comes from the German town of Schwabach, just south of Nuremburg, where it is believed the font was designed. The earliest extant appearance of the typeface is from an Augsburg printing of 1472 (Augsburg is about 80 miles (129 km) south of Schwabach). It was famously used by Anton Koberger for both his Latin and German editions of the lavishly-illustrated Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, a comprehensive history of the world from the creation to the date of publication compiled by Nuremberg scholar and doctor, Hartmann Schedel. Those editions proved to be so popular that the Augsburg printer Johann Schönsperger (ca. 1455-1521) plagiarized the editions to produce his own small folio German edition, with 2100 new woodcuts, in 1476, followed by a Latin edition in 1497, and then another German reprint in 1500, all using Schwabacher type.

The original leaf shown here is from the p signature of Schönsperger's 1497 Latin edition which is included in the leaf book . . . the highest form of flattery . . . by the American book designers, letterpress printers, and specialists in the Nuremberg Chronicle Adrian (1923-1988) and Joyce L. Wilson (1914-1996), printed under the direction of George R. Kane (1913-2009) at the Cowell Press of UC Santa Cruz by Felicia Rice (b. 1954) and Nick Zachreson in an edition of 90 copies in 1982. Ours is one of 60 copies bound in half leather. For the record, UWM Special Collections does not condone the breaking of books for sale or for inclusion in leaf books. Our copy was part of the donation from our late friend Jerry Buff (1931-2025).

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Typography Tuesday

BLACKLETTER

Blackletter, also called Gothic, was the first typographic form to be founded in metal type by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-fifteenth century. The first book printed in English was in blackletter, as was the first book printed in England (both by William Caxton; the first printed in Bruges in 1473, which was also the very first book printed in Bruges, and the latter in Westminster in 1476). It is called blackletter because its narrow, condensed forms produce a darker appearance on the page than do Roman fonts. By the late 16th century, most Western national printers had dropped blackletter in favor of the arguably more readable Roman-style fonts, except for some Scandinavian countries which held onto blackletter forms until the late 18th century, and Germany being the last holdout until 1941.

Blackletter fonts are still used today, however, as display faces, for ceremonial use, and for certain kinds of emphases. That’s certainly how Theodore Low De Vinne (1828-1914) would have used it at his De Vinne Press in New York. These examples come from Types of the De Vinne Press, published in New York by the De Vinne Press in 1907. Theodore De Vinne founded his press in 1883. He was also a co-founder of the prestigious Grolier Club and one of the leading commercial printers of his day, whose enterprise had a profound influence on American printing and typography. This book was intended as a promotional specimen book “for the use of compositors, proofreaders, and publishers,” to demonstrate the wide variety of typographic possibilities that could be available to their clients.

View more posts from Types of the De Vinne Press.

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This dragon seems ready to bite a piece off of the letter Q.