The Fork and Broom Press

Parsnip Cake

Folio-Grotesk: frm 1957, Bauer + Baum; Hobby: 1955, Walter Rebhuhn; Verona: 1958, Hans Matheis

It was love at first bite, so to speak. We met Parsnip Cake for the first time in Scotland at Ceilidh Place, Wester Ross. It is a lovely place serving soup of the day, cake and they sell books as an extra treat.
Folio Grotesk is a sans serif and it got teamed up with two scriptlike fonts Hobby and Verona. All three fonts were designed roughly at the same time by four different designers.

Pies

Georg Trump (1896-1985) designed metal type Amati (1951), Signum (1955) and Codex (1954) within less than five years, while himself being a household name in typedesign already. Signum and Amati go well together, both are narrow fonts. While Signum was rare, Amati was on stock in many printing offices.

Colophon

Unger-Fraktur: 1794; Deutsch-Römisch: 1921-1928, Friedrich H. E. Schneidler; Schreibmaschinenschrift; Mediäval; Diskus: 1938, Martin Wilke

Johann Friedrich Unger (1753-1804) was a publisher, printer and typographer in Berlin and a contemporary of Goethe and Schiller, publishing some of their works. In 1788 he was appointed official publisher of the writings of the Akademie der Wissenschaften. And in 1789 he started working on his famous Unger-Fraktur.

He wanted it to be a clean and clear blackletter, stripped of all the squiggle that had obscured the design of some blackletter over time, making some almost illegible.

The typecases with Unger-Fraktur had been stuck in a type cabinet at a school where I picked them up. The cabinet was padlocked and the keys had been long lost, so the metal type was more than safe. It is old but in very good working condition. Mediäval is one of the few fonts that arrived after the studio had moved in at the cattle stable-turned-printroom in Oppenwehe.