#type specimens

Type specimens are great but I want to see how fonts look in use. I'm trying to get in the habit of making a little picture each time I install a new font.

Fonts: Kobata, The Void, Womb Script, Wreckage, Jester, 4 Fromages, Teranoptia, Amakan, Trickster, Lobular, Roubaix Industrielle.

Typography Tuesday

Last month we presented some printer's flowers and electrotype cuts from from Printing from Metal and Wood, handprinted in 1985 by English type and printing enthusiast Mark Arman at his Workshop Press in Thaxted, Essex, in an edition of 145 copies signed by the author/printer. Today we display some of the diverse type specimens from this book.

The subtitle of the book is, Using Hand Presses and 18th & 19th Century Types, Blocks, Electors, and Decorations; The Story of an Obsession with Printing. The content of the book is clearly idiosyncratic to Arman's approach to printing. He writes:

In Paragraphs on Printing, Bruce Rogers said 'The best printing follows traditional lines because printing is a conservative as well as a preservative art.' By making this modest collection of types and blocks, and illustrating them here, I have accepted this principle. Some biographical details, and a few personal anecdotes have been included, for they help explain how printing became an obsession, and why this book had to be printed. It is hoped it will give some pleasure.

Our copy, another donation from the estate of our late friend Dennis Bayuzick, once belonged to the printing historian Richard E. Huss and bears his bookplate.

View other books from the estate of Dennis Bayuzick.

View other posts on work by Mark Arman.

View other posts on type specimen books.

Join us at Typographics 2024 in NYC this weekend! Draw Down will be participating in the book fair, which is free and open to the public!

Typography Tuesday

Last week, I showed you some initials I encountered at the Milwaukee Public Library's first Art Book Club gathering in October. Those initials were from an 1898 specimen book, Schriften Atlas, compiled by Ludwig Petzendorfer. This week I'm showing some alphabet sets from another collection I encountered there. These specimens are from Vignettes, lettres, chiffres, monogrammes et rehauts modernes, published in Paris by Les Éditions Guérinet, R. Panzani, successeur in 1931. The specimen book includes alphabets by several designers. The sets shown here are by A. Bardi and P. Picaud, whom I have not been able to identify. Still, the letter forms are quite enjoyable.

The next Art Book Club session at MPL will be on Saturday, December 16, 2023, 1:30-3 pm, with the theme of "Technology."

View other type specimen books.

View more Typography Tuesday posts.

Typography Tuesday

Last month, the Milwaukee Public Library's Arts & Media Department held its first Art Book Club session. Intended as an informal art book appreciation club that meets once a month in the Art, Music, and Recreation room, each session explores a different theme by looking at the wide variety of art materials in the collection. The collection is historical, non-circulating, and vast. I attended and spent an hour and a half mesmerized by the array of luscious materials presented.

There was design, architecture, fashion, and much more. As a type nerd, I was especially drawn to the several late 19th- and early 20th-century type specimen books on the tables. Here, for example, are some pages of chromatic initials by various European and American companies from Schriften Atlas, compiled by Ludwig Petzendorfer and published in Stuttgart by Julius Hoffmann in 1898.

MPL held its second Art Book Club session on the theme of "Animals" last night, but I missed it because I was conducting an evening instruction session. Dang! But I'll be attending future sessions when I can and I'll keep y'all apprised.

View other type specimen books.

View more Typography Tuesday posts.

Typography Tuesday

German type and graphic designer Alfred Krugmann produced the type specimen portfolio Schriftvorlagen für die Praxis in 1964, published in Ulm-Donau, Germany by Karl Gröner Verlag. The portfolio was intended as an instruction set, and the title translates as "Font Templates for Practice." It presents 20 plates of serif, san-serif, Gothic, and script typefaces along with 10 more plates demonstrating how these fonts might be used together for advertising presentations. Today we present those last ten plates demonstrating applications of the templates. We will present the type specimen plates in the future.

View other type specimen books.

Typography Tuesday

By the early 20th century, the American Type Foundry (ATF), founded in 1892, had become a type-founding behemoth by absorbing over two dozen type foundries. The Inland Type Foundry, established in St. Louis in 1894, was specifically founded to compete with ATF by the Schraubstadter brothers, whose previous foundry, Central Type Foundry, had been absorbed by ATF in 1892.

Inland produced a broad range of original typefaces, and for a time was quite successful. Most of their original designs were produced before the publication of this 1906 catalog, Specimen Book & Catalog. Inland was unique among foundries in that many of their typefaces were named after their prominent customers, a savvy marketing move. This catalog was produced in loose-leaf form in St. Louis, Chicago, and New York, where they had expanded their business. In the introduction, the Foundry explains:

The printing of a specimen-book requires time, and the Inland Type Foundry produces new faces with such rapidity that a new edition was scarcely off the press until it was, to some extent, obsolete, as one or more faces had been produced while the book was going thru the press. . . . It is therefore a great pleasure that we present our solution of the problem. In this, the first loose-leaf specimen-book, we are enabled to devote ample space to proper display, and at the same time furnish you specimens which are constantly new and up to date.

Inevitably, and perhaps ironically, the Schraubstadters eventually sold Inland to ATF in 1911.

View other type specimen books.