Lazy Dog, CAST IT #3, 2019

‘Der Schriftgiesserʼ (The typefounder) is a description of typefounding included in Werkstäte der heutigen Künste oder die neue Kunsthistorie – a virtually encyclopedic series concerning crafts originally published in Leipzig between 1761–1779. The author, Johann Samuel Halle (1727–1810), was an academic and a Prussian civil servant. His description of typefounding is probably the first detailed text on the subject written in German by an author who was neither a printer nor any other kind of tradesman.

In 1922, the Wilhelm Woellmer typefoundry of Berlin republished the text of ‘Der Schriftgiesser’ as a keepsake booklet for the annual meeting of the German typefoundries. Thanks to Dan Reynolds we now have Halle’s text for the first time in English. This comes with the only commentary on its contents ever published in any language.