In the turmoil of the post-war period, Gudrun von Hesse was unable to return to her parental home in Potsdam and moved to a small town in Hesse at the end of 1945.* Equipped with a portfolio, she introduced herself to the Bauer Type Foundry company in Frankfurt am Main. It was Foundry Director Georg Hartmann himself who gave her the opportunity to maintain an in-house handbook bindery, with permission to work for other customers as well. At Bauer, GZvH got to know the artistic director Heinrich Jost and the type designer Konrad F. Bauer and learnt a lot about the production process of metal type. Her friendly manner was greatly appreciated and her skills were highly valued. Jost praised her as ‘a perfect manual binder’ (in a letter of recommendation dated 24 February 1947).

Finally, the GZvH was brave enough to approach the female die cutters at Bauer. Stamping had not been practised by women up to this point – if there were exceptions, they were notable. Engraving the mirror image of a letter in a steel stamp up to six centimetres long was the first step in the production of metal lettering. This was a meticulous process that required skilful hands to carefully carve out the typeface using gravers, files and sometimes counter-stamps. The finished stamp could be used to make an impression in a softer block of metal (usually copper or iron), which was then called a matrix or mat.** The matrix is essentially the mould from which a type founder casts metal type.***

However, GZvH’s original plan was not a set of cast lettering, but to cut stamps that she could mount on wooden handles to use as stamps for labelling leather book covers and spines – and she wanted to have her own design available for this. Under the guidance of stamp cutter Josef Spahn, GZvH learnt how to form letters in brass using various engraving tools and a great deal of patience (bookbinding stamps did not have to be cut in steel). Without much training, she began to work out her own capital letter alphabet as well as the corresponding numerals and ornaments in 36 point, an appropriate title size. According to the GZvH, no test letters were necessary and no letter was cut twice.

GZvH’s first explorations into lettering were self-taught early on, from books by Edward Johnston and Rudolf Koch. Much later, in 1941, she attended Johannes Boehland’s classes in lettering and spelling at the Meisterschule für Graphik und Buchgewerbe in Berlin. The result of her stamping, completed in 1947, is a child of its time: sans serif letterforms that are rich in contrast and slightly emphasise the ends of the strokes. Subtle shifts in contrast, especially in the ‘S’, and of course the hand-cut character lend this alphabet a certain liveliness.

The letters were first used for the title of an anniversary book published by the Bauer Type Foundry on the occasion of Georg Hartmann’s 75th birthday (printed in 1946, bound one year later). The name on the cover and spine is embossed in gold – a GZvH speciality. In the following years, it produced further gold-stamped type spreads and blind embossing with this alphabet. It became her exclusive ‘house face’ for special occasions.

The name Hesse Antiqua was given years later by her husband Hermann Zapf in honour of her maiden name. Hermann Zapf and Günter Lepold, head of the Stempel Type Foundry, discovered some of her typefaces at an exhibition in 1948. Two years later, one of these designs was published as Diotima, GZvH’s first published typeface. This was followed by nine typefaces for metal, photographic and digital typesetting techniques, which were published with Stempel, Berthold, Bitstream and URW. After 70 years, Hesse Antiqua is finally being published digitally as a complete typeface.

The digital appearance of the Hesse Antiqua

A digital Hesse Antiqua is the result of careful considerations and decisions made in consultation with Gudrun Zapf from Hesse. While she is the type designer, my role became that of a ‘digital punch’. The digital font we are releasing today is not a revival, but the transformation of Hesse Antiqua from a letter alphabet into a typeface – taking into account 70 years of changes in font technology between the two stages.

Ever since the GZvH presented me with their type stamps on the first day of spring 2015, I was curious to mould Über Hesse Antiqua into a typeface. A major challenge immediately arose in its various manifestations in different ‘circumstances’: initial drawings, the punches, smoke samples, blind embossing, hand stamps with gold foil. Which of these would serve as a template for the digital redrawing? It seems that when cutting the letterforms in brass, GvH disregarded some of the details they had designed in the first drawings. The resulting stamps are a reliable reference for the proportions and details of the letterforms, but the stamps ‘in action’ provide better evidence of their intentions. GZvH knew that the letters would lose some of their contrast when stamped – especially when ink was involved.

In an early consultation between GZvH and myself, we decided that the lowercase letters should not be added 70 years later, but that the punctuation was necessary for contemporary applications. The font also contains some ornaments from GZvH’s collection of brass stamps – the three-leafed branch is a tribute to their popular piece The Nightingale Tree. Thanks to Monotype’s design studio, the font is equipped with matching small caps and various accents. As GZvH does not have an e-mail address, several trips to Darmstadt were necessary this year to discuss progress. On one occasion, she also sent corrections she had made with white-out and black markers by ‘traditional’ mail. Figure ‘2’ was a much-discussed figure.

My colleague Norman Posselt, a typophile photographer who accompanied me on many visits to Darmstadt, took macro shots of stamps and of printed proofs that served as sharp templates for digitisation. In the production and mastering phase, Bernd Volmer from Monotype cleaned up my data and removed one or two anchor points (when I say ‘one or two’, I mean … there were several). Finally, Akira Kobayashi pointed out that all pointed strokes should be slightly rounded to preserve the warmth of the original Hesse Antiqua.

With the help of interpolation tools and Bernd’s font engineering skills, we determined a weight that corresponds to the original Hesse Antiqua as GZvH envisioned it on a leather book cover. GvH developed the Hesse Antiqua for 36 point and we advise not to use it much smaller. It looks just as good on classic book covers as it does on contemporary editorial design covers – and it is certainly also suitable for posters.

Until recently, when I visited her in Darmstadt, the GZvH asked me somewhat incredulously whether the publication of Hesse Antiqua would really take place. I am very pleased that we can announce it on her 100th birthday. Happy birthday, Mrs Zapf von Hesse!