H. Berthold AG was one of the largest and most successful

type foundries A type foundry is a company that designs or distributes typefaces. Before digital typography, type foundries manufactured and sold metal and wood typefaces for hand typesetting, and matrices for line-casting machines like the Linotype and Mono ...

in the world for most of the modern

typographic Typography is the art and technique of typesetting, arranging type to make written language legibility, legible, readability, readable and beauty, appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, Point (typogra ...

era, making the transition from foundry type to

cold type Phototypesetting is a method of setting type. It uses photography to make columns of type on a scroll of photographic paper. It has been made obsolete by the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publishing ( digital typesetting). ...

successfully and only coming to dissolution in the digital type era.

History

H. Berthold was founded in

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...

in 1858 by Hermann Berthold, initially to make

machined Machining is a process in which a material (often metal) is cut to a desired final shape and size by a controlled material-removal process. The processes that have this common theme are collectively called subtractive manufacturing, which utilizes ...

brass Brass is an alloy of copper (Cu) and zinc (Zn), in proportions which can be varied to achieve different mechanical, electrical, and chemical properties. It is a substitutional alloy: atoms of the two constituents may replace each other wit ...

printer's rule. It then moved into casting metal type particularly after 1893. The company played a key role in the introduction of major new

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 thousands o ...

s and was a successful player in the development of

typesetting Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical ''type'' (or ''sort'') in mechanical systems or '' glyphs'' in digital systems representing '' characters'' (letters and other symbols).Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random ...

machines. The production premises were on

Wilhelmstrasse Wilhelmstrasse (german: Wilhelmstraße, see ß) is a major thoroughfare in the central Mitte and Kreuzberg districts of Berlin, Germany. Until 1945, it was recognised as the centre of the government, first of the Kingdom of Prussia, later of t ...

No. 1 until 1868, and then on

Mehringdamm The Mehringdamm is a street in southern Kreuzberg, Berlin. In the north it starts at Mehringbrücke and ends - with its southernmost houses already belonging to Tempelhof locality - on Platz der Luftbrücke. It is the historical southbound Berlin- ...

43. In 1979 the factory moved to another location between

Teltow Canal The Teltow Canal, also known as the in German, is a canal to the south of Berlin, the capital city of Germany. The canal lies in both the states of Berlin and Brandenburg, and at points forms the boundary between the two. It takes its name from ...

and Wiesenweg in Lichterfelde. The H. Berthold foundry's most celebrated family of typefaces is arguably

Akzidenz-Grotesk Akzidenz-Grotesk is a sans-serif typeface family originally released by the Berthold Type Foundry of Berlin. ''german: label=none, italic=no, "Akzidenz"'' indicates its intended use as a typeface for commercial print runs such as publicity, tic ...

(released 1898), an early sans-serif which prefigured by half a century the release of enormously popular neo-grotesque faces such as

Helvetica Helvetica (originally Neue Haas Grotesk) is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann. Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the famous 19th century (1890s) ...

. In 1950,

type designer Type design is the art and process of designing typefaces. This involves drawing each letterform using a consistent style. The basic concepts and design variables are described below. A typeface differs from other modes of graphic production su ...

Günter Gerhard Lange Günter Gerhard Lange (12 April 1921, in Frankfurt (Oder) – 2 December 2008, in Großhesselohe near Munich) was a German typographer, teacher and type designer. He was longtime art director of Berthold Type Foundry and was one of the fathers ...

embarked upon a long affiliation with the company, for which he designed various original typefaces, including

Concorde The Aérospatiale/BAC Concorde () is a retired Franco-British supersonic airliner jointly developed and manufactured by Sud Aviation (later Aérospatiale) and the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC). Studies started in 1954, and France an ...

and Imago, and oversaw the foundry's revivals of classic faces such as

Garamond Garamond is a group of many serif typefaces, named for sixteenth-century Parisian engraver Claude Garamond, generally spelled as Garamont in his lifetime. Garamond-style typefaces are popular and particularly often used for book printing and bo ...

Caslon Caslon is the name given to serif typefaces designed by William Caslon I (c. 1692–1766) in London, or inspired by his work. Caslon worked as an engraver of punches, the masters used to stamp the moulds or matrices used to cast metal ty ...

Baskerville Baskerville is a serif typeface designed in the 1750s by John Baskerville (1706–1775) in Birmingham, England, and cut into metal by punchcutter John Handy. Baskerville is classified as a transitional typeface, intended as a refinement of what ...

, and

Bodoni Bodoni is the name given to the serif typefaces first designed by Giambattista Bodoni (1740–1813) in the late eighteenth century and frequently revived since. Bodoni's typefaces are classified as Didone or modern. Bodoni followed the ideas o ...

Cold Type

As a typefounder, Berthold had no background in producing

machinery until the introduction of the Diatype in 1958. The Diatype was a relatively small desktop-sized headline-setting device (i.e. not intended for continuous justified text), based on a glass disc font master. Character selection was by means of a trigger mounted on the front of the machine (giving rise to the colloquial naming of the machine as the "duck-shooter" (in the UK at least). When changing font, it was a notable feature of the machine that it required calibration of

letter-spacing Examples of headline letter spacing In typography, letter spacing, character spacing or tracking is an optically consistent adjustment to the space between letters to change the visual density of a line or block of text. Letter spacing is distin ...

by the typing of a nonsense character sequence: "Hillimillihirtzheftpflasterentferner". Measuring the width of this 'word' at a specific font size would indicate if the character width and spacing was set correctly.

Digital Type

Diatronic

Berthold Diatronic systems were based on a glass grid master of each

font weight 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 mod ...

, composed on a code-driven system. A marching-character display provided editing capabilities only to the line currently being composed.

Berthold ADS (Akzidenz Dialog System)

The next incarnation of the Diatronic system was widely adopted in the high-quality ad setting trade in Europe. Its major advantage was fine control of

typography Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing ( leading), ...

thanks to continuously variable optics, allowing fractions of point sizes to be specified. Operator feedback was by means of a green-screen CRT display showing code

mnemonic A mnemonic ( ) device, or memory device, is any learning technique that aids information retention or retrieval (remembering) in the human memory for better understanding. Mnemonics make use of elaborative encoding, retrieval cues, and imag ...

s only, it being left to the operator to visualise final output. Keyboard operation was innovative, utilizing many keys with a single legend, such as , , , , etc. System operation was therefore effected by a combination of keys, such as , then to save a file.

Successor Corporations

Beset by financial troubles, H. Berthold AG ceased operations in 1993. Berthold Types Ltd., a

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

-based company, one of the companies which claimed to be the copyright owner of Berthold fonts, took over distribution of the Berthold digital type library and has released several new typefaces under the direction of Lange, who had retired in 1990, but served as an artistic consultant to the company until his death in 2008. Berthold Types' co-owner Harvey Hunt died in 2022, and the inventory of Berthold Types Limited (but not the legal entity) was bought by

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

later that year.

Typefaces

These foundry types were produced by Berthold:.

Cold Typefaces

These types were produced for photo-composition by Berthold:

References

External links

Berthold Types Limited– Official website

Discussion about the copyright of Berthold fonts in the forum of Typophile website

Ulrich Stiehl document discussing the copyright of Berthold fonts (in German)

Ulrich Stiehl document in English discussing the copyright of Berthold fonts
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Berthold (Company) Letterpress font foundries of Germany Cold type foundries Commercial type foundries Manufacturing companies based in Berlin