One of the great women type designers of the 20th and early 21st centuries was the German designer, calligrapher, and book binder Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse, who died in 2019 at the age of 101. Von Hesse’s several noted typefaces stem directly from her practice of calligraphy. She believed that all good type design required the “human touch” and that a mastery of calligraphy was essential to becoming a good type designer.
Initially, von Hesse’s calligraphy practice was largely self-taught, learning from the same books by Rudolf Koch and Edward Johnston used by her future husband, the prolific German calligrapher and type designer Hermann Zapf. In 1941, after receiving her Masters degree in book binding, she began a formal course of study with the calligrapher and painter Johannes Boehland in Berlin. Afterward, she worked as a professional bookbinder, calligrapher, and educator when the D. Stempel AG Type Foundry scooped her up in the late 1940s for her design work, issuing her first typeface Diotima in 1951. She went on to design a dozen distinctive typefaces in her career for Stempel, Berthold, URW Hamburg, and Bitstream. In 1991, she became the second woman (but not the last) to win the Frederic W. Goudy Award, and in 2018, in honor of her 100th birthday, the Monotype Corporation released the typeface Hesse-Antiqua, which is based on an alphabet she designed in the late 1940s.
Shown here from top to bottom:
1.) Cover for the 2007 exhibition catalog Spend your alphabets lavishly! at the Rochester Institute of Technology, designed by fellow Goudy Award winner Jerry Kelly in 10 pt Nofret, designed by von Hesse, for The Typophiles in association with RIT Cary Graphics Art Press, Rochester, in an edition of 800 copies.
2.) Display set of Diotima pilfered from the internet.
3.) Quarter-vellum and paste paper binding by von Hesse for Plus Ultra, published by the Trajanus Press in 1950, the first book printed in Diotima. Photograph from Spend your alphabet lavishly!
4.) Display set of Alcuin from the internet, a design inspired by the advisor to Charlemagne and his Carolingian minuscule, released by URW Type Foundry in 1992.
5.) Das Hohelied Salomos, a manuscript book written and bound by Gudrun von Hesse in 1936. Image from Spend your alphabet lavishly!
6.) Display set of Smaragd from the internet, released by Stempel in 1954.
7.) Carmina type specimen, released by Bitsteam in 1987, from Spend your alphabet lavishly!
8.) Display set of Christiana, by the Berthold Type Foundry in 1991.
9.) Photograph of Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse from our copy of Gudrun Zapf von Hesse published in 2002 by Mark Batty in an edition of 20 copies bound by Judi Conant.
10.) Display set of Hesse-Antiqua, released by the Monotype Corporation in 2018 in honor of von Hesse's 100th birthday.
View our other post on Gudrun Zapf von Hesse celebrating her 100th birthday.
