To Claus’s credit, Moran’s Morison is the best book that I have read all year. By “best book,” I mean that it is rip-roaringly entertaining. Who would have though that S.M.’s life would have so many laugh-out-loud moments? I heartily recommend following Claus’s—and my own—example; purchase a copy of this book for your own libraries, dear readers. Morison (1971) is not an expensive item, and it is worth at least triple for every penny that you’ll put down for it.

There are several quotable passages in the book, especially if you are a fan of S.M.’s Jesuit-style wardrobe and/or personality. I would have preferred more insight into his 1920s travels through Germany. For instance, Moran writes on page 82 that, “[Morison] was mostly made welcome, but the brothers Klingspor would not let him into their typefoundry just after the war because he was an enemy.” When was this Offenbach visit exactly? From the book’s timeline, it would seem to have taken place in 1922, which is a bit later than “just after the war.” I assume that the Klingspors were unaware that Morison, as an objector to the war, had been imprisoned toward its end.

However, my favorite bit of the book may be found on pages 93–94, where Moran explains part of the impetus behind the “program” of typeface revivals at Monotype during the interwar period:

…startling changes were not to be expected at the Monotype Corporation, and it was not until Morison became typographical adviser to the University Press, Cambridge in 1925 that opposition to the cutting of new types began to recede. It was perhaps just as well for posterity that Morison had been offered only a part-time appointment with Monotype, and was able to take on an additional one at Cambridge. As a full-time employee of Monotype he would have suffered even more frustration than he did, and little would have been achieved.

Morison needed outside support to convince the Monotype staff. A certain amount was forthcoming, not from printers, but from publishers, including Francis Meynell, who had founded the Nonesuch Press. Meynell induced the Corporation to improve various Plantin characters, and to add others such as tied sorts, thus helping to create the situation where outside suggestions were accepted as normal. If only publishers would express a desire for new faces, and if their printers could be persuaded to use them in books, opposition within Monotype would crumble. Morison set himself the task of winning the publishers, for which he was well placed, as he was working for several.

More books like this one, please!

Mentioned in this article
Moran, James, Stanley Morison: Hist typographic achievement. London: Lund Humphries (1971).

On Tuesday, July 6, Lorenz Schirmer, Atilla Korap, and I made the two-hour drive to Saarbrücken, a small city on Germany’s border with France. We formed something of a “Linotype delegation” to an exhibition opening at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar. The exhibition, entitled Good News, showed a semester’s worth of student work from a class of the same name offered by BHK Saar guest professor Alessio Leonardi. Alessio has done a lot of work for Linotype over the past two decades, so attending his event was the least that we could do to show our support!

In Alessio’s class—if I understand correctly—students were tasked with creating one drawing a day. The topics would come from news stories. The work shown in the exhibition was primarily posters, although there were process books on a table, too.

Prof. Indra Kupferschmid and Alessio Leonardi in the lobby of the HBK Saar. As most TypeOff. readers will know, Indra teaches typography at the HBK Saar. She and her marvelous students create excellent work. In fact, I think that their results are some of the most interesting student-made typographic pieces in the country. Keep your eyes on Saarbrücken, folks.

Indra told me again during the exhibition opening that she does not like long blog posts, like the wrap-ups published after the Cyprus and Brno conferences. With so many of these articles appearing each week online, it is difficult to find the time to read all of them. I often spend quite a bit of time writing things for TypeOff. or I Love Typography, and find it difficult to reconsider article-length. I’d rather let the article be as long as the information (and time) allows. When it comes to publishing shorter ideas … well, isn’t that what Twitter was invented for? Or Tumblr? Not that I am planning on getting a Tumblr site anytime soon.

Dear readers, let me know what you think in this post’s comments section!

 

You can’t really see it in the photograph above, but Lorenz, Atilla, and Indra are watching the Holland – Uruguay World Cup semi-final on an iPhone screen (the iPhone is propped up behind the bread).

After the exhibition had been formally opened, Alessio’s students organized a BBQ in the HBK courtyard. As for the work in the exhibition itself, I assume that there is still a chance for interested parties to see it. Presumably, the posters will continue to hang in the HBK lobby for some time. So, if you happen to be in Saarbrücken, stop by and have a look!

To see some more photos, including some photos of the posters currently on display at the HBK, visit this Flickr set.

On Friday, June 25, I drove to Mainz with Otmar Hoefer and Atilla Korap, two Linotype colleagues. We made the short trip from our Bad Homburg office to hear a lecture from this year’s Gutenberg Prize winner, Mahendra Patel.The 18th Gutenberg Prize recipient, Mahendra Patel is the first designer from India to receive this award. The official presentation of the award took place on Saturday, June 26, in Mainz’s city hall. But Otmar, Atilla, and I were not present for that.

The lecture given by Mahendra Patel in the Gutenberg Museum on the night before the award ceremony was not about his typefaces, but about some of the results of various letter design workshops that he has conducted with students at schools in different countries over the past several decades. Mahendra Patel spoke in English, and his speech was summarized and translated into German by Tanja Huckenbeck.

During the 1960s, Mahendra Patel studied in Baroda and Ahmedabad, India, as well as in Basel, Switzerland. In 1970–1971, Mahendra Patel apprenticed with Adrian Frutiger in Paris. Today, he is one of India’s most prolific typeface designers. As an instructor, he has influenced generations of students.

 
Since 1968, the city of Mainz and the International Gutenberg-Gesellschaft have bestowed the Gutenberg Prize on selected figures from the fields of printing, typography, type design, or other book-related specialities. The prize was originally given every three years. This schedule changed slightly after German reunification. In Leipzig, a similar prize had been bestowed annual, since 1967. Since 1994, each city has been taking turns with the honors. Mainz bestows its award during even-numbered years; the Leipzig prize is presented during odd-numbered years.

The winners (to date) of the Gutenberg Prize are as follows: Giovanni Mardensteig (1968), Henri Friedlaender (1971), Hermann Zapf (1974), Rudolf Hell (1977), Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt (1980), Gerrit Willem Ovink (1983), Adrian Frutiger (1986), Lotte Hellinga-Querido (1989), Ricardo J. Vincent Museros (1992), Paul Brainerd (1994), John Dreyfus (1996), Henri-Jean Martin (1998), Joseph M. Jacobson (2000), Otto Rohse (2002), Robert Darnton (2004), Hubert Wolf (2006), Michael Knoche (2008), Mahendra Patel (2010).

For a list of the winners of the Gutenberg Prize of the City of Leipzig, visit this Wikipedia page.

 

During the introduction to his lecture, Mahendra Patel showed a series of slides like this one, illustrating the variety of forms in India’s scripts.

 

These student workshop results date from 1990. This feels quite cutting-edge to me. How many design professors were designing PostScript fonts with students that early?

 

“Hippo” in the Devanagari and Latin scripts, and illustrated to. This was one of many results from multi-script logo design workshops that Mahendra Patel showed during his lecture.

 
Links
For more information about Mahendra Patel and his work, visit his website, or read this biography.

After he was in Germany, Mahendra Patel spent some time in the UK. Dan Rhatigan has a photo of him presenting to students at the University of Reading. Jo de Baedemaeker took pictures of this, too.

To see all of my photos from the Mahendra Patel lecture in Mainz, visit my Flickr space.

There is a fair amount of information online about Karl-Heinz Lange and his work. The best article that I know of is in English, at PingMag, in an article about the VEB Typoart. Ivo Gabrowitsch has written a moving tribute as well, which may be read in German or in English. There is a brief biography at primetype.com, with links to the new OpenType versions of his typefaces. The Typografie.info Typowiki also has a brief biography (in German). Ivo Gabrowitsch wrote a nice summary of the Lange lecture at the Berlin Typostammtisch on Fontwerk (in German), which also contains links to more images on Flickr. A few years ago, I purchased a copy of Lange’s 1965 Schrift: schreiben, zeichnen, konstruieren, schneiden, malen. Photos of this booklet may be found in an earlier TypeOff. post.