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Typography Tuesday

Here are some examples of chromatic wood type borders from an untitled and undated specimen catalog of the Luzern, Switzerland, wood-type manufacture Roman Scherer (1848-1922), produced ca. 1905. Scherer founded Holztypenfabrik Roman Scherer in Luzern in 1877, designing and manufacturing wood type using wood from local fruit trees. Scherer’s company was the first and probably the only Swiss wood-type manufacturer, operating until the late 1970s. 

The business remained prosperous after Scherer's death, but in the mid-1960s the foundry had to shut down because of the construction of Swiss Autobahn 27, and in 1966 the company was acquired by the Haas Type Foundry and moved to Münchenstein near Basel. Manufacture of wood type slowed and in 1976 production was moved to Gedi-Schriften of the Diller brothers company in Bamberg, Germany. Today, Scherer type catalogs are much sought after.

View more posts from this specimen book.

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Shadow Hide 3 - Line Holtegaard

Danish , b, 1980 -

Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”