Koch-Antiqua is a

serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ...

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are list of type ...

intended for decorative and display use, designed by

Rudolf Koch Rudolf Koch (20 November 1876 – 9 April 1934) was a German type designer, professor, and a master of lettering, calligraphy, typography and illustration. Commonly known for his typefaces created for the Klingspor Type Foundry, his most widel ...

and published by the

Klingspor Type Foundry The Klingspor Type Foundry was a German moveable type, hot metal type foundry established in 1892 when Carl Klingspor bought out the Rudhard’sche Foundry of Offenbach. His sons, Karl and younger brother Wilhelm, took on the business in 1904, ren ...

from 1922 onwards. It is a delicate face with a low

x-height upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the let ...

, intended for decorative printing rather than for extended

body text __NOTOC__ The body text or body copy is the text forming the main content of a book, magazine, web page, or any other printed or digital work. This is as a contrast to both additional components such as headings, images, charts, footnotes etc. on ...

. Koch-Antiqua was Koch's first roman or "Antiqua" type (the kind generally used in western Europe, as opposed to

blackletter Blackletter (sometimes black letter), also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for the Danish, Norweg ...

writing) and achieved considerable attention both in Germany and abroad. It was exported under the names ''Locarno'' and ''Eve''.

Walter Tracy Walter Valentine Tracy RDI (14 February 1914 – 28 April 1995) was an English type designer, typographer and writer. Biography Walter Tracy was born in Islington, London and attended Shoreditch Secondary school. At the age of fourteen he wa ...

described it as "a highly individual design" that "reveals the working of a fastidious mind and a skilful hand . . . perfectly suited to express in print the idea of elegance."

Family

Koch-Antiqua was released in several weights: * Roman: the regular weight and the only style digitised by Linotype. * ''Kursiv'': a mixture of a true italic (in which the letters take handwriting forms) and

oblique Oblique may refer to: * an alternative name for the character usually called a slash (punctuation) ( / ) * Oblique angle, in geometry *Oblique triangle, in geometry *Oblique lattice, in geometry * Oblique leaf base, a characteristic shape of the b ...

(simply slanted, as in the ''a''). The capitals have a line drawn in them at larger sizes, an effect that in Tracy's words "only a designer thoroughly familiar with the elaborate capitals of some of the older German gothic lettering, and uninhibited by the traditions of roman and italic, would apply." * Bold (''groß'') and bold italic: A more "carved" design. * ''Oberlängen'': Double-height capitals and letters with ascenders, making the lowercase look even smaller and more delicate. * Decorative capitals: '' Zierbuchstaben'', inline capitals, and ''Initialen'', floral designs created by Koch's associate

Willi Harwerth Willi is a given name, nickname (often a short form or hypocorism of Wilhelm) and surname. Notable people with the name include: Given name * Willi Apel (1893–1988), German-American musicologist * Willi Boskovsky (1909–1991), Austrian violinis ...

. * ''Fett:'' Extra-bold weight. A number of unauthorised imitations were later created by

American Type Founders American Type Founders (ATF) Co. was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85% of all type manufactured in the United States. De Vinne, Theodore Low, ''The Practice of Typography,'' Century Comp ...

under the names of Rivioli and Paramount.

Digitisations

Koch-Antiqua has never been fully digitised, but a number of releases of some of the weights have been created. According to Paul Shaw, Eva Antiqua is the most complete digitisation, which also adds digitisations of the bold weights of the ATF knockoff font Paramount. None of the releases available as of 2011 include the decorative and extra-high letters of the original. At least one

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the f ...

implementation uses the ''Zierbuchstaben'' as its basis.

References

{{notelist, 30em

External links

Specimen
digitised by Interrobang Letterpress
Extra-high capitals
digitised by Indra Kupferschmid
Fonts in Use

Klingspor specimen book 1951
Display typefaces Serif typefaces Typefaces designed by Rudolf Koch