#stempel type foundry

Historic Woman Printer/Publisher of the Week:

Gudrun Zapf von Hesse (b. 1918)

Yesterday, our little beehive was so busy making honey, we just couldn’t get to posting our usual Typography Tuesday blog. So, we thought we’d take a little diversion in our usual Historic Woman Printer/Publisher post and combine it with Typography Tuesday to focus on the work of the great German typographer, calligrapher, and book binder Gudrun Zapf von Hesse. 

Von Hesse worked as a book-binding apprentice, studied the calligraphic work of Rudolf Koch and Edward Johnston, and learned punchcutting at the Bauer Type Foundry in Frankfurt before setting up her own bookbinding shop after WWII. She began working as a type designer for the Stempel Type Foundry in Frankfurt soon after -- where she met and married the prolific German type designer Hermann Zapf -- and continued a long and successful career. Among the several typefaces she designed for Stempel are Diotima, Ariadne, and Smaragd, but she also designed typefaces for other companies, notably Alcuin for URW and Carmina BT for Bitstream. 

In 1991, she became the second woman (but not the last) to win the Frederic W. Goudy award. Her husband was the first recipient of this prestigious award in 1969. In honor of her 100th birthday this past January, the Monotype Corporation released the typeface Hesse-Antiqua, which is based on an alphabet she designed in the late 1940s. Happy Birthday Gudrun!!

The images and designs shown here are from another, yet-uncataloged donation from our friend and benefactor Jerry Buff, Gudrun Zapf von Hesse published in 2002 by Mark Batty in West New York, New Jersey, and printed in Von Hesse’s Norfet Roman which was originally designed for the Berthold Type Foundry of Berlin. Our copy is one of 20 copies bound by Judi Conant in Vermont and singed by Von Hesse, including an extra suite of 13 specially-printed specimens, among which are six original, hand-printed specimens signed by Von Hesse.

View our other Typography Tuesday posts.

Typography Tuesday

What do these five publications in the top image have in common? Well, yes, they are all indeed artists’ books, but they also are all printed in Helvetica type.

Helvetica?!! You mean that dull and anonymous traffic-sign typeface?

No. Helvetica, that timeless, upright, round and open san-serif face of eminent readability.

Helvetica was the brain-child of Eduard Hoffmann, head of the Haas Type Foundry near Basel, who envisioned a new Swiss design based on the 1890 (re-cut by Haas in 1900) Schelter & Giesecke Grotesk, the official Bauhaus typeface, and entrusted the design to Max Miedinger, an expert on Grotesk typefaces. After much input from Hoffmann, the type was cut and cast, and first appeared as Neue Haas Grotesk in 1957, and renamed Helvetica in 1960 by the Stempel Type Foundry. The rest, as they say, is history.

The out-sized cultural impact of this much-heralded and much-maligned typeface is exquisitely expressed in what is perhaps our favorite documentary on typography, Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica (2007). In it, graphic designer Michael Bierut -- in what may be the most expressive part of the movie, if not the funniest -- describes what it must have been like when Helvetica first appeared on the scene: 

It just must have felt like you were scraping the crud off of, like, filthy old things and restoring them to shining beauty . . . .  Can you imagine how bracing and thrilling that was? That must have seemed like you’d crawled through a desert with your mouth just caked with filthy dust and then someone is offering you a clear, refreshing, distilled, icy glass of water to clear away all this horrible, kind of like, burden of history.

Bierut goes on to give examples, first showing magazine ads from the early 1950s displaying “every single visual bad habit that was endemic in those days. . . . zany hand-lettering everywhere, swash typography to signify elegance, exclamation points, exclamation points, exclamation points.” Then he shows a Coke ad when “Helvetica was in full swing”:

No people, no smiling fakery, just a beautiful, big glass of ice-cold Coke. The slogan underneath: It’s the Real Thing. Period. Coke. Period. In Helvetica. Period. Any questions? Of course not. Drink Coke. Period. Simple.

View a short clip of Bierut’s “Coke” example, or watch the full, hilarious 4-minutes of his take on the Helvetica transition.

Shown here, from the top:

Ian Tyson. Seven Motes of Zen Dust.  San Diego, California: Brighton Press, 2015. Edition of 40 signed copies, with the text was set in Helvetica Neue, reworked for Sempel in 1983.   

Claire Van Vliet and Margaret Kaufman. Aunt Sallie's Lament. West Burke, Vermont: Janus Press, 1988. Edition of 150 copies.

Mark Strand.  Prose: Four Poems. Portland, Oregon: Charles Seluzicki; Sweden, Maine: Ives Street Press, 1987. 187 copies printed by Barbara Cash, with the text is set in Monotype Univers by Mackenzie-Harris (an Helvetica redesign by Adrian Frutiger), with titles handset in Stempel Helvetica.    

Ricardo Bloch and Kevin Kling. The Incredible Servant and the Master of the Unknown.  Minneapolis: R. Bloch, 1991. Edition of 2000, set in Helvetica Narrow.

Jenna Rodriguez. Overheard.  Chicago: Jenna Rodriguez, 2013. Printed in Helvetica CY.

Creative Type: A Sourcebook of Classic and Contemporary Letterforms.  London: Thames & Hudson, 2005. With type designer Günter Gerhard Lange’s entry on Helvetica.

BTW, this entire post was written in -- you guessed it -- HELVETICA!!