If our new type face this month puts you in mind of the legendary Bernhard Modern Roman, you’re right on the mark—it’s from the hand of the same designer, Lucian Bernhard (1883-1972) who also gave us his eponymous Gothic, Fashion, and Tango. He became known as an artist, designer, and typographer in his native Germany before emigrating to the U.S. in 1928. This, his ‘first-name face’, predates those others, all of which he did for American Type Founders after coming to New York. Evidently he liked the hint of taper he gave the stems of the characters, for this design element was incorporated to a much more overt degree in Bernhard Modern Roman, which appeared some twelve years later. So here for your printing pleasure is Lucian in 24 point. This face was designed for the Bauer foundry in five variants: Light, Book, Semibold, Bold, and Open. Characters of particular interest are the cap Q, with its own built-in gearshift lever, the soaring ft ligature, and the lowercase Q that thinks it’s a unicorn. Our electrodeposited matrices were made by Baltotype (with or without license) who tagged it with the unimaginative name of Graphic, offered in Light and Bold. The Light seems to be Bauer’s Semibold, and that is what we have cast. We have mats in 12pt through 36pt for both variants.
Our first try at Lucian turned out to be something of a calamity! Without getting too technical: In the critical process of alignment in typefounding, if we lack a specific designated vertical aligning standard (to four decimal places) for a particular casting, we establish one by aligning the beard of the capital H flush to the side of the body opposite the nick—this allows a shoulder of maximum dimension to accommodate descenders. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, look at the picture on the Best Practices page of the Skyline site.) For a variety of reasons, castings are done in order of set width—widest character to narrowest. Well we blasted right into this project, and on the fifth day of casting, came to the first ascender (that ft ligature). This character extends considerably above the cap line and was thus off the body. Yes, it’s rare, but on some type faces the ascenders top the cap line, and we had not bothered to considered this possibility. Oh that dreaded sinking feeling! So into the hellbox go five days of casting, and we start over from scratch aligned to the proper standard. As I often say, in this business the opportunities for error are unlimited. But we did what we had to do, and here for you are the fruits of our labor.
In all our spare time we made a fourth haul of new old stock ATF type from our out-of-state source. In this load of 8,100 lbs we were able to get the last of the ATF, plus a large quantity of Helvetica and Souvenir cast by Germany’s Stempel foundry. The latest revision of the inventory includes everything brought in prior to this load—it consists of over 1,100 line items and will be posted later today. In the coming weeks we will be evaluating the contents of the final load and adding it to the list, which is accessible from the main menu on the Skyline site.
September of course brings National Type-High Day! We get our high from making type, and you can get yours from free shipping (USA), September 18 only. Plug in Coupon Code 9/18 when you check out and you’ll get the discount.