#metro type

It's Fine Press Friday!

One of the early productions of the Limited Editions Club was Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), with reproduced watercolor illustrations by American artist and illustrator René Clarke (1886-1959) and a translation for this edition by Alice Raphael (1887-1975), printed in an edition of 1500 copies signed by the artist and issued on March 22, 1932 to mark the centenary of the author's death. The book was also designed by Clarke and printed in New York by the Bartlett-Aldus Press in W. A. Dwiggins' Metro type on a special rag paper imported from Italy, and bound in dark-red cloth stamped in gold with a pattern by Clarke.

View our other posts on Faust.

View other books published by the Limited Editions Club.

Typography Tuesday

Before the holidays on December 16, the Milwaukee Public Library held its third Art Book Club session, a informal art book appreciation gathering that meets once a month in the Art, Music, and Recreation Department of the Central Library. The theme for this meeting was "Technology" and there were all manner of beautifully-designed technology books to peruse and ogle over. It was an immersive experience, and of course I was particularly pleased to spend time with the type specimen books.

This week I highlight one of those books, Specimen Book Linotype Faces, published in Brooklyn, New York by the Mergenthaler Linotype Company in 1939. The typefaces displayed here are:

Century Bold, designed by Milwaukee-born Morris Fuller Benton in 1900.

Gothic No. 13, by Morris Fuller Benton ca. 1900.

Franklin Gothic, designed by Benton in 1903.

Metro Light, designed by W. A. Dwiggins in the early 1930s.

Garamond No. 3, originally designed for American Type Founders by Morris Fuller Benton in the late 1910s and licensed to Linotype's American branch around 1936.

Memphis, originally designed for the Stempel Type Foundry by Rudolf Wolf in 1929.

View other type specimen books.

View more Typography Tuesday posts.