{typography} – Page 6 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 776

Illustration by Adolf Hoffmeister for a Czech edition of The First Men in the Moon by HG Wells.

• It’s good to hear that Czech animator Jiří Barta is back at work on his long-gestating feature film based on the Golem legend. The new iteration looks like a reimagining of the entire project.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The First Men in the Moon by HG Wells.

• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: Ben Wickey breaks down more of his Great Enchanters pages.

• At Colossal: Charles Brooks photographs the interiors of musical and scientific instruments.

• At Igloomag: Philippe Blache on neo-noir, doom jazz and related atmospheric music.

• At The Daily Heller: The book-brick that is the 1,264-page Emigre Specimen Encyclopedia.

• New music: Changing States by Matmos, and Of Shadow Landscapes by Skotógen.

• At the BFI: Josh Slater-Williams selects 10 great Japanese time-travel films.

• Lawrence English remembers the sound-art pioneer Alan Lamb.

• Tunde Adebimpe’s favourite albums.

• Time Machine (1967) by Satori | Time Machine (1968) by Lemon Tree | Turn Back Time (1971) by Time Machine

Documents Décoratifs by Alphonse Mucha

I’ve had a copy of the Dover edition of these plates for some time, but it’s good to find a digital copy at last, especially now I can see that Dover bleached all the subtle background tones to a solid white. The artwork looks much better in its original state. It was also a little surprising to discover that Documents Décoratifs was originally a collection of loose sheets in a portfolio, not a book as I always thought.

The plates were Alphonse Mucha’s contribution to that small collection of publications intended to assist other designers and craftspeople in their decorative work. Mucha’s drawings break down his style into a series of isolated motifs and design elements: panels, borders, figures, flowers, lettering and other details, together with a few pages of more complete designs. He also offers several pages of suggestions for applying his Art Nouveau flourishes to jewellery, furniture and other household objects. I’ve used parts of these designs a few times in my own work, most recently in the Bumper Book of Magic. Even if you don’t have a practical use for the plates they’re all very beautiful pieces in themselves, especially the pencil drawings.

Continue reading “Documents Décoratifs by Alphonse Mucha”

Baurenfeind’s capitals

Six of the enigmatic capitals.

After writing about my occasional and not very diligent search for the origin of an unidentified set of calligraphic capitals, Jacob Filipp resolved the whole matter for me very quickly. The mystery dates back to 1997 when I bought a Pepin Press book, Ornamental Type, a substantial overview of historic lettering which contains many quality reproductions but no information at all as to the origin of the alphabets. One set of calligraphic capitals were immediately attractive even though many of them had their flourishes cropped by their containing frames. I’ve since used these letters a number of times in print designs, and also used them as page backgrounds for the very first version of my website. In 2002 there was still a tendency in web design for things to look streamlined, cybernetic or futuristic, qualities I was happy to ignore. After ten years or so of using and reusing the letters the question of their origin began to nag at me, hence my recent attempts to solve the mystery.

From Baurenfeind’s Schreib-Kunst at the Letterform Archive.

It turns out that the capitals were the work of Michael Baurenfeind (1680–1753), a German calligrapher whose exceptional work appeared on these pages just over a year ago. Had I been more observant I would have noticed that one of the pages in the 1716 edition of Baurenfeind’s Schreib-Kunst is the alphabet in question (I even posted the page here!) but the copy of the book at the Internet Archive is missing the page that shows the first half of the alphabet. Every time I’d gone searching for the capitals I’d been using the letter A as a guide, looking for the reflected flourishes at the foot of the letter in other alphabets. The obvious thing to do would have been to look for more of the letters using image searches, which is what Jacob did, eventually locating a capital D on a deleted post at Design Observer.

I’m pleased to have Michael Baurenfeind revealed as the creator of the capitals, his work stands out even among his equally talented contemporaries. The cropped flourishes mean they aren’t ideal for print purposes—in the past I’ve used them in backgrounds where the cropping goes unnoticed—but I’ve thought a few times of making a new set with the cropped sections restored. Now that I know Baurenfeind is the designer this would be easier to do. Any hesitation about how to properly complete a flourish or fill in a missing area could be resolved by consulting Baurenfeind’s other lettering designs. My thanks again to Jacob for solving the mystery!

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta
• Liber Artificiosus Alphabeti Maioris
• Michael Baurenfeind’s extravagant calligraphy
• Bergling’s Art Alphabets
• Grand capitals
• Costume capitals
• Paulini’s mythological alphabet
• Joseph Balthazar Silvestre’s Alphabet-album
• Johann Theodor de Bry’s Neiw Kunstliches Alphabet
• The Book of Ornamental Alphabets
• Paul Franck’s calligraphy
• Gramato-graphices
• John Bickham’s Fables and other short poems
• Letters and Lettering
• Studies in Pen Art
• Flourishes

Weekend links 773

The Tower of Babel from Turris Babel (1679) by Athanasius Kircher, showing how wide the Tower would have to be at its base to reach the Moon.

• The week’s literary resurrection: Penguin announced Shadow Ticket, a new novel by Thomas Pynchon. “Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering…”

• The week’s musical resurrection: Stereolab announced Instant Holograms On Metal Film, their first new album since Not Music in 2010. Aerial Troubles is the new single with a video which has prompted complaints in the comments about the use of AI treatments for the visuals.

• At Public Domain Review: Modern Babylon: Ziggurat Skyscrapers and Hugh Ferriss’ Retrofuturism, a long read by Eva Miller. Previously: The Metropolis of Tomorrow by Hugh Ferriss.

• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: Ben Wickey is selling some of the original art from his Lives of the Great Enchanters pages.

• At Wormwoodiana: The Golden Age of Second-Hand Bookshops is now. Mark Valentine explains.

• “Alvin Lucier is still making music four years after his death – thanks to an artificial brain.”

• At Colossal: Hundreds of fantastic creatures inhabit a sprawling universe by Vorja Sánchez.

• Coming soon from Radiance Films: A blu-ray disc of Essential Polish Animation.

• Pattern design and illustration by Gail Myerscough.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Homage Script.

• New music: Sabi by Odalie.

• RIP Max Romeo.

• Babylon (1968) by Dr John | War In A Babylon It Sipple Out Deh (1976) by Max Romeo | Babylonian Tower (1982) by Minimal Compact

Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta

These pages turned up when I was searching for (and failing to find) a specific set of calligraphy capitals. Sixteenth-century calligraphy books commonly present their texts and alphabets in collections of engraved plates. Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta stands apart from its peers with coloured inscriptions and page after page of illuminated embellishments—fruits, flowers, insects and other animals that have nothing to at all do with the calligraphic exercises. The reason for the illustrations is explained in a note on the Getty website: the calligraphy by Georg Bocskay came first (in 1561–1562), the book being intended as a showcase of calligraphic styles which demonstrated Bocskay’s incredible skill and mastery of a wide range of lettering. The illuminations were added thirty years later (from 1591–1596) by Joris Hoefnagel at the request of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, and an art patron with a celebrated taste for the unusual. Rudolf’s court was filled with alchemists, John Dee and Edward Kelly among them; he commissioned paintings from Giuseppe Arcimboldo, had his own zoo, and his Kunstkammer was one of the largest ever assembled. Hoefnagel’s embellishments have nothing to do with penmanship but the book was only one of a vast number of exquisite or curious objects that Rudolf either commissioned or collected.

Looking through the book I wonder what Georg Bocskay would have thought about all the superfluous additions to his meticulous work. I’m also reminded of a pair of equally odd volumes: the Voynich Manuscript (which Rudolf II was reputed to have owned, although there’s no evidence for this), and Luigi Serafini’s Codex Serafinianus, both of them books which combine their pictures of plants (and many other things in Serafini’s case) with unusual scripts. Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta is available today in facsimile reprints but most people will see the pages via the Getty’s scans. The Getty website isn’t the best place to browse the pages, however. You’re better off going here where the entire book may be seen on a single page.

As for my calligraphic quest, the search continues to be a fruitless one although in this case it did turn up a quantity of painted fruit. The capitals I’ve been looking for are in a book I bought in the 1990s, a guide to alphabet design through the ages whose pages offer little information as to the source of their lettering designs. It’s not a great problem by any means but things like this often nag at me. In the past I’ve borrowed letters from the enigmatic alphabet for my own designs. I like to know the origin of a thing when I’m using it myself. The search will continue…

Continue reading “Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta”