Typography Tuesday
SPIRAL / EMERSON TYPE
German-American printer-publisher Joseph Blumenthal established his Spiral Press in 1926. His major design influences were Bruce Rogers, Francis Meynell, and Daniel Berkeley Updike, and to a certain extent William Edwin Rudge. His most significant influence, however, was Willy Weigand and his Munich-based Bremer Presse. This can be seen in their typeface designs. They may be compared in the full-page examples above (Spiral, left , 1933; Bremer, right, 1929) and in the details (Spiral, top; Bremer, bottom).
As American type designer and printer Jerry Kelly observes, “Both are set in only one size of type; both use hand-lettered initials and titles,” and both typefaces “were cast at the Bauer Type foundry in Frankfurt, and indeed all were cut by the same punchcutter, Louis Hoell.” Kelly also notes, however, that the Spiral type is much less calligraphic than Bremer type. To us, the Spiral type is also much lighter than the weighty denseness of the Bremer type. Blumenthal first used his proprietary Spiral type in 1931 for an edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature.
Subsequently, British typographer Stanley Morrison, chief consultant for the British branch of the Monotype Corporation, suggested that the Spiral type be offered commercially in the Monotype system. For this, Blumenthal designed complementary italic and small capital fonts. Monotype appropriately named the new type Emerson, after the first appearance of the Bauer-founded type, producing the type family between 1935 and 1939. The Spiral and Emerson types may be compared in the top image. Emerson became one of the few contemporary, non-historical typefaces to be issued by Monotype (others included Eric Gill’s Perpetua and Jan van Krimpen’s Lutetia).
When Blumental finally closed his shop in 1971, he had his now well-worn, Bauer-produced Spiral type melted down, and the punches and matrices donated to the Cary Collection at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The Emerson typeface lives on however, and a new digital font was recently issued by Nonpareil Type. Many contemporary fine-press printers have used and continue to use Monotype Emerson, including Jerry Kelly. Emerson was the second type (after Bembo) installed at his Kelly/Winterton Press. Kelly writes, “We selected it for the same reasons I suspect other fine presses find it particularly suitable: Emerson is an elegant, classic book face that is contemporary, not an imitation of an earlier type.” Kelly’s own homage to Blumenthal (last image above) is appropriately set in Emerson for an edition of Emerson’s essay on Friendship.
Click on the images for details.
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