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E R Weiss: the Typography of an Artist by Gerald Cinamon
Lovers of beautiful books, elegant design, and clear typography will be delighted with our new monograph about the book artist, Emil Rudolf Weiss.
Weiss stands high in the pantheon of great book artists that includes William Morris, Bruce Rogers and Francis Meynell, among others, but because his work was mostly distributed in Germany, he tends to be less well known in the English speaking world. Certainly little has been written about him or his work in English since the 1930s. Yet he was sufficiently regarded by Stanley Morison to be a guest designer for an issue of The Fleuron, another issue of which included an essay by Morison about Weiss ornaments. His Weiss-Antiqua typeface was particularly popular in the USA, mainly due to the availability for slug casting through Intertype matrices and the publicity work of the Bauer Type Foundry office in New York. Today, most of us have, perhaps unknowingly, seen the digital version of Weiss roman, if not the original metal version. It remains a popular typeface, particularly in book work where one of its recent outings was on the dust-jacket of the US edition of The Da Vinci Code and the UK edition of Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen.
Author Gerald Cinamon studied graphic design at the Yale School of Art & Architecture, and first came across Weiss Initials while working in New York in the early 1960s. He a long and successful career at Penguin books spanned the years from 1961 to 1985. After his retirement, Cinamon learned German in order to research his excellent biography of Rudolf Koch (Oak Knoll, 2000).
PANGUR BAN
Number four in our series of type specimen/cat poems features a monk's cat & a beautiful uncial typeface
Winner of the 2011 Award for Excellence for a Letterpress Hardback Book from the Tampa Book Arts Studio
Found in the margins of a medieval manuscript, Pangur Ban allows us a small glimpse into the scriptorium where a 9th-century monk and his cat sit side by side. It features linocuts by Philippa Threlfall and is set in the unusual uncial typeface Samson designed by Victor Hammer. The title page also displays Rudolf Koch's Neuland Inline -- we like the fact that his son Paul cut the matrices for Samson in 1930.
Once again we have called upon our colleague Bill Severson to produce a custom-designed paste paper, handmade at the Press especially for this book.
The book is a single section of eight leaves bound in boards of Severson paste paper with a cloth spine. A title label is pasted to the spine. Read more...