Walbaum is the name given to

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 ...

typefaces 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 thousands o ...

in the "Didone" or modern style that are, or revive the work of early nineteenth-century

punchcutter Punchcutting is a craft used in traditional typography to cut letter punches in steel as the first stage of making metal type. Steel punches in the shape of the letter would be used to stamp matrices into copper, which were locked into a mould sh ...

Justus Erich Walbaum Justus Erich Walbaum (25 January 1768 – 21 June 1837) was a prominent German typefounder and punchcutter of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Walbaum was a punchcutter, who carved steel punches used as a master to stamp matrices, the mou ...

(1768 – 1837), based in

Goslar Goslar (; Eastphalian: ''Goslär'') is a historic town in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the administrative centre of the district of Goslar and located on the northwestern slopes of the Harz mountain range. The Old Town of Goslar and the Mines ...

and then in

Weimar Weimar is a city in the state of Thuringia, Germany. It is located in Central Germany between Erfurt in the west and Jena in the east, approximately southwest of Leipzig, north of Nuremberg and west of Dresden. Together with the neighbouri ...

. Walbaum-style typefaces are "rational" in design, with minimal serifs and strong contrast between thin horizontal and thick vertical strokes, following the work of typefounders such as

Firmin Didot Firmin Didot (; 14 April 176424 April 1836) was a French printer, engraver, and type founder. Early life Firmin Didot was born in Paris into a family of printers founded by François Didot, the father of 11 children. Firmin was one of his gra ...

and

Giambattista Bodoni Giambattista Bodoni (, ; 16 February 1740 – 30 November 1813) was an Italian typographer, type-designer, compositor, printer, and publisher in Parma. He first took the type-designs of Pierre Simon Fournier as his exemplars, but afterwards bec ...

. They are often used in publishing and remain very popular in Germany. Walbaum also designed

fraktur Fraktur () is a calligraphic hand of the Latin alphabet and any of several blackletter typefaces derived from this hand. The blackletter lines are broken up; that is, their forms contain many angles when compared to the curves of the Antiqu ...

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 ...

typefaces, which (while not stylistically related) similarly have a structured and precise design. Walbaum sold the materials of his foundry to Brockhaus, who in turn sold them to the

Berthold Type Foundry H. Berthold AG was one of the largest and most successful type foundries in the world for most of the modern typographic era, making the transition from foundry type to cold type successfully and only coming to dissolution in the digital type era. ...

. In the twentieth century, Walbaum's type regained popularity through its sale by Berthold and copies were made by several companies. Digital revivals exist from

František Štorm František "Franta" Štorm (born 3 July 1966) is a Czech musician, photographer, typographer, writer, teacher, artist, illustrator and record producer, famous for being the vocalist and a founding member of the black metal band Master's Hammer. ...

(in a release with

optical size In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a "sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design. In mode ...

s),

Monotype Monotyping is a type of printmaking made by drawing or painting on a smooth, non-absorbent surface. The surface, or matrix (printing), matrix, was historically a copper etching plate, but in contemporary work it can vary from zinc or glass to ac ...

(a 1933 version created for its

hot metal typesetting In printing and typography, hot metal typesetting (also called mechanical typesetting, hot lead typesetting, hot metal, and hot type) is a technology for typesetting text in letterpress printing. This method injects molten type metal into a mol ...

system, and a separate digital version released in 2018),

Berthold Berthold or Berchtold is a Germanic given name and surname. It is derived from two elements, ''berht'' meaning "bright" and ''wald'' meaning "(to) rule". It may refer to: *Bertholdt Hoover, a fictional List_of_Attack_on_Titan_characters, character ...

, Linotype and others.

References

External links

* Monotype's gallery of Walbaum prints
1812 specimen sheetstext sizedisplay sizes

Justus
- Open source digitization from

Font Library The Font Library is a project devoted to hosting and encouraging the creation of fonts released under Free Licenses. It is a sister project to Openclipart and hosts over 6000 fonts from over 250 contributors. These are intended to be downloaded ...

{{Monotype typefaces Modern serif typefaces Typefaces with optical sizes