Joan Michaël Fleischman (1707–27 May 1768, ),
was an 18th-century German-Dutch typographer and
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 ...
.
Fleischman worked in the
Baroque
The Baroque ( , , ) is a Western Style (visual arts), style of Baroque architecture, architecture, Baroque music, music, Baroque dance, dance, Baroque painting, painting, Baroque sculpture, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished from ...
period of design and his roman typefaces have been described as
"transitional" in style, more stylised and sharply cut than was common before.
Perhaps his most notable design was his complex music font, that was later used to decorate the edges of documents, including the first bank note of the Netherlands called the "roodborstje" or robin.
Biography
He was born in Wöhrd,
Nuremberg
Nuremberg (, ; ; in the local East Franconian dialect: ''Nämberch'' ) is the Franconia#Towns and cities, largest city in Franconia, the List of cities in Bavaria by population, second-largest city in the States of Germany, German state of Bav ...
,
but moved to
Amsterdam
Amsterdam ( , ; ; ) is the capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, largest city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It has a population of 933,680 in June 2024 within the city proper, 1,457,018 in the City Re ...
, where he worked for Izaak van der Putte and Hermanus Uytwerff before opening his own type foundry in 1735.
Fleischman was unable to continue the type foundry on his own, and Rudolf Wetstein ran the business for him, while he continued to work for him as a punchcutter. After Rudolf died in 1742, his son Hendrik Joris Wetstein sold the company in 1743 to
Izaak Enschedé of
Haarlem
Haarlem (; predecessor of ''Harlem'' in English language, English) is a List of cities in the Netherlands by province, city and Municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality in the Netherlands. It is the capital of the Provinces of the Nether ...
, forming the nucleus of the type-founding business of
Joh. Enschedé
Royal Joh. Enschedé () is a printer of security documents, stamps and banknotes based in Haarlem, Netherlands - it specialises in print, media and security. The company hosted the Museum Enschedé until 1990 and has branches in Amsterdam, Brus ...
, which remained operational until 1990.
Fleischman continued to live in Amsterdam and made fonts for Enschedé as well as other Amsterdam businesses. His "Courant-Letter" face used by the ''
Haerlemse Courant'' was one of the first marketed specifically for the use of newspapers;
historian
Harry Carter praised him as "a superb cutter of small types, and in refinement of design and execution his news fonts are unsurpassed".
Fleischman apparently somewhat concentrated on smaller typefaces; the Enschedé's
display typeface
A display typeface is a typeface that is intended for use in display type (display copy) at large sizes for titles, headings, pull quotes, and other eye-catching elements, rather than for extended passages of body text.
Display typefaces will ...
s were mostly cut by
Jacques-François Rosart.
Fleischman lived in Amsterdam until the end of his life, dying there in 1768.
During the 1760s he contributed to a planned book on the technology of typefounding and punchcutting intended to be published by the brothers Ploos van Amstel as a Dutch response to
Pierre-Simon Fournier's ''Manuel Typographique'', which was never finished.
A short manuscript attributed to Fleischman, perhaps a draft of part of this work, was acquired by a Dutch bookseller and published in 1994 with English translation.
Fleischman's typefaces were received with great popularity in his lifetime and Enschedé's lavish type specimen "of 1768" evidently became something of a memorial to him (it is dated to 1768 on the title page, but all copies known were apparently finished the following year; Fleischman's portrait is dated 1769).
John A. Lane, who has prepared an edition and commentary on it, notes that "Enschedé scrupulously saved Fleischman's own account book and other documents, including even his passports, so that his career can be reconstructed in remarkable detail."
Fournier also thought that his work had brought "considerable accessions" to the reputation of the Enschedé foundry.
He was also commemorated by the Ploos Van Amstel Brothers' type foundry in the introduction to their specimen following his death.
Music font
When Breitkopf developed the first typeface for music in 1755, Enschedé wanted to improve on the idea, and hired Fleischman to create a more flexible and accurate system. Soon after, the first Haarlem songbook ''Haerlemsche Zangen'' was published with this font. Previous songbooks had had their music engraved on copper plates by musicians. The new font was designed to be used by publishers in the same way that typeface could be used to print words, but this idea was not successful, as the musicians who wrote the music needed training in order to use the font. An innovative musician who used the Enschedé-Fleischman font was
Leopold Mozart
Johann Georg Leopold Mozart (November 14, 1719 – May 28, 1787) was a German composer, violinist, and music theorist. He is best known today as the father and teacher of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and for his violin textbook ''Versuch einer grün ...
for his Dutch edition of his ''Instructions to play the violin'' in 1766.
[''Grondig onderwijs in het behandelen der viool'', reprint of 1766 publication by Leopold Mozart, A. Oosthoek's uitgeversmaatschappij, 1965] His son the ''wunderkind'' played the organ in the
St. Bavochurch across the street from Enschedé's publishing company in the same year.
Posthumous reputation
Flesichman's typefaces have a high
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 le ...
(large lower-case letters, following the "
Dutch taste" style of the preceding century) and strong appearance on the page, and have not always been well-reviewed aesthetically. In 1777
Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf
Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf (Leipzig, 23 November 1719 – 28 January 1794, Leipzig) was a German music publisher and typographer.
Biography
Breitkopf was the son of the publisher Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf, founder of the publishing hou ...
considered Fleischman one of the three greatest punchcutters of the eighteenth century alongside Fournier and
John Baskerville
John Baskerville (baptised 28 January 1707 – 8 January 1775) was an English businessman, in areas including japanning and papier-mâché, but he is best remembered as a printer and type designer. He was also responsible for inventing "wo ...
(although in practice
Baskerville's typefaces were probably cut for him by John Handy), although he was not impressed by every aspect of his aesthetic.
They generally did not appeal to printers and type designers in the twentieth century, for instance receiving criticism from
Daniel Berkeley Updike
Daniel Berkeley Updike (February 24, 1860 – December 28, 1941) was an American printer and historian of typography. In 1880 he joined the publishers Houghton, Mifflin & Company, of Boston as an errand boy. He worked for the firm's Riverside ...
's influential ''Printing Types'',
and have been less commonly been revived than the work of Renaissance and early modern punchcutters such as
Claude Garamond
Claude Garamont (–1561), known commonly as Claude Garamond, was a French type designer, publisher and punch-cutter based in Paris. Garamond worked as an engraver of punches, the masters used to stamp matrices, the moulds used to cast metal ty ...
,
Robert Granjon
Robert Granjon (Paris, c. 1513 - Rome, 1590) was a French punchcutter, a designer and creator of metal type, and printer. He worked in Paris, Lyon, Antwerp, and Rome. He is best known for having introduced the typeface style Civilité, for his ...
and
Miklós Tótfalusi Kis, although a 1927 revival was published supervised by
Georg Belwe.
Lane comments that "his romans lack the staid majesty and subtle curves"
of Baskerville's delicate typefaces of the same period, and
James Mosley
James Mosley (born 1935) is a retired librarian and historian whose work has specialised in the history of printing and letter design.
The main part of Mosley's career has been 42 years as Librarian of the St Bride Printing Library in London, whe ...
wrote that "Fleischman was undoubtedly a virtuoso punchcutter, even though there is something rather arid about his hard, angular types."
Interest in Fleischman's work has been greater in the digital type period, and numerous digital type designs have been influenced by Fleischman's work.
Several contemporary designs influenced by Fleischman have been intended for newspapers, including
Hoefler & Co.'s Mercury and Fenway by
Matthew Carter
Matthew Carter (born 1 October 1937) is an English type designer.[A Man of Letters](_blank) , son of Harry Carter.
Kris Sowersby
The Klim Type Foundry is a digital type foundry operated by Kris Sowersby, a New Zealand typeface designer. Klim was founded in 2005 and is currently based in Wellington. Klim produces retail typefaces, custom typefaces and custom lettering and l ...
comments that "for all their extroverted detailing, Fleischman’s text typefaces work extraordinarily well. Even colour and efficient forms make them interesting and readable."
Matthew Carter, who interned at the Enschedé type foundry as a young man, comments "I’ve always liked Fleischmann’s faces for small sizes...I think Fleischmann was wonderful at doing those tiny faces that were very legible."
DTL Fleischmann, published by
Dutch Type Library, is a particularly faithful digital revival of his work with
optical sizes
In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a ''typeface'', defined as the set of fonts that share an overall design.
For instance, the typeface Bauer Bodoni (shown in the figure) includes fonts "Roman" (or "regular" ...
.
Gallery
File:Handgietvormen.jpg, Handheld moulds like the ones he is holding in Cornelis van Noorde's engraved portrait of him
File:Enschede-J.M. Fleischman 1758 parel muziek font.jpg, ''Parel Muziek'' font
File:Enschedé - Banknote roodborstje with music font on edges.jpg, First Dutch banknote in 1814, called ''Roodborstje'', with Fleishman's music font recycled for the decorative edging.
File:Influence of Fleischman.png, Two modern digital fonts influenced by Fleischman: Joshua Darden
Joshua Darden (born 1979 in Northridge, Los Angeles, California) is an American typeface designer. He published his first typeface at the age of 15, becoming according to ''Fonts In Use'' the first known African-American typeface designer.
C ...
's Freight Text Book and GFS Fleischman by George D. Matthiopoulos.
Notes
References
* ''Enschede aan het Klokhuisplein'', by Just Enschedé, Joh. Enschedé, 1991,
*
Joh. Enschedé
Royal Joh. Enschedé () is a printer of security documents, stamps and banknotes based in Haarlem, Netherlands - it specialises in print, media and security. The company hosted the Museum Enschedé until 1990 and has branches in Amsterdam, Brus ...
anniversary publication, produced on the occasion of their 150th anniversary in 1893
External links
Proef van letteren Enschedé type specimen of 1768. Apparently partly intended as a memorial to Fleischman: his typefaces are specifically identified as his work and dated. An annotated edition with commentary has also been published authored by John A. Lane. Als
lower-quality scan on Google BooksJoan Michaël Fleischmanon
bibliopolis.nl
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fleischman, Joan Michael
1707 births
1768 deaths
Dutch typographers and type designers
Businesspeople from Amsterdam
Joh. Enschedé
German emigrants to the Dutch Republic