Typography Tuesday
This week we present Rudolf Koch’s Kabel and Zeppelin typefaces as printed by John Grice of the Evergreen Press in Gloucester, England, for his article “Playing with Kabel” in Matrix 22, Winter 2002. Grice started his press in the 1980s, and is known for his extensive collection of fine and rare typefaces. He is always on the lookout for classic types in good condition. As he says, “New foundry type is no longer available in the UK, at any price. . . . Good foundry type is the holy grail, type that can serve for a lifetime.”
Grice had just acquired at auction some 40+ Hamilton cases (produced in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, btw) of type ranging from 18-pt. Kabel to 96-pt. shaded Zeppelin. Koch designed the geometric san-serif Kabel family of types for the Klingspor Type Foundry in Offenbach in the late 1920s, and at the end of the decade augmented it with an elaborate variation called Zeppelin. After the types were all proofed, Grice thought he would “print a broadsheet specimen that would show off the character of the face and reflect, in a small measure, the typographic style of display setting of the thirties.” Grice writes:
I could not resist printing the 96-point Zeppelin initially, shifted it to run vertically, and then built out from that step by step. . . . There was no plan for I worked simply in a reactive way according to what had been placed on the sheet. From the start I wished to work in red and black as is characteristic of so much German work, and I had a wish to quarter the sheet as many earlier specimen sheets seemed to do and also as the sheet was to be tipped in to Matrix. . . . Kabel is not hard and functional, it has a human hand, a reflection of the spirituality and concern for the artisan’s skills shown by its creator, Rudolf Koch.
The broadside was just a tad too big for our scanner, so we split it in half, which does not quite align in this post, but it offers a fair representation.
Our copies of Matrix, published by John and Rosalind Randle at their Whittington Press, are another donation from our friend Jerry Buff.
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