Bamag-Licht product catalog
This catalog by the lighting department of the Berlin-Anhaltische Maschinenbau-Actien-Gesellschaft, or Bamag-Licht for short, was issued in 1909 in Charlottenburg, some eleven years before this city became incorporated into Greater Berlin.
The booklet cover was printed in two colors, using fonts that can be combined in layers. The main typeface is a version of De Vinne Open, or De Vinne Outline. Like regular De Vinne, this variant originated with the Central foundry, in roman and italic styles. Catalogs by ATF, the successor to Central, pointed out that the Italic would register for color printing with solid De Vinne. They didn’t do so for the upright style. Also, ATF’s catalogs from 1896, 1897, 1899, and 1902 all show the Italic only. The earliest appearance for the roman Open that I found so far is from 1903.
The Hoffmeister foundry from Leipzig, Germany showed an upright Zierschrift „De Vinne“ with open styles for bicolor printing already in 1895. This design was named Amerikanische Mediäval by 1900, and continued by Stempel under that name after the acquisition of Hoffmeister in 1918. Klinkhardt, another Leipzig foundry, had such open styles, too, as Bianca breit with Bianca Kursiv. They added a schmal (condensed) style before 1905. Bianca was continued by Berthold into the 1920s.
However, the specific version used here can’t be Klinkhardt’s: in Bianca, even thin strokes like the bars in f or t are outlined – in De Vinne Outline, this is only true for the largest sizes. More decisively, Bianca’s T is flat at the top, without any upward-pointing serifs. We’re hence looking at Hoffmeister’s cut, which closely follows the original De Vinne design, including this detail. It also sports the double hyphen, a remnant of blackletter conventions that lingered on in roman type and lettering at the time.
Lichte Amerikanische Mediäval (“Open American Oldstyle”) is filled with its solid counterpart (≈ De Vinne), and paired with a shaded all-caps grotesque for “Abteilung 12”. This face appears to be one of the precursors to a design that ATF reissued in the 1930s as Marble Heart. It may have originated in France, and was carried by Haenel and many other German-speaking foundries. Flinsch had a version for bicolor printing as Buntdruck-Schriften 1874–1876, released around 1894. Three cheers for Dan Reynolds and his invaluable work on cataloging the sans serif typefaces sold in German-speaking Europe during the nineteenth century! As coincidence would have it, Hoffmeister’s bicolor De Vinne and Flinsch’s Buntdruckschriften were presented on opposing pages in the first issue of Archiv für Buchgewerbe und Gebrauchsgraphik from 1895.
The header on the title page is set in Sorbonne (1905), Berthold’s recutting of Cheltenham. The products – torches, outdoor lamps, incandescent bodies, equipment – use Grasset (1898; cast in Germany by Genzsch & Heyse before 1904). The insert mentioning a 20% discount combines Romana and Undine. The latter was made at Stempel in mager (1902) and fett (1903) weights, as an extension of the all-caps Graphik, which was their version of Edina. Undine’s lighter style was digitally revived by Linotype as Grafiko.
The typography on thsi spread exclusively uses Grasset.
