Koch Lichte Grotesk is the newest revival of Lichte Neuland by Rudolf Koch, designed by Edvinas Žukauskas and Jérôme Knebusch and published by Poem for Neuland’s centenary in 2023. Lichte Neuland appeared five years after Neuland in 1928, in the Gebr. Klingspor specimen dedicated to the American market by the Continental Typefounders Association. Koch Lichte Grotesk is an accurate revival of the 12 pt Cicero size, the smallest one. It is currently the only fully identified original size, as shown on the 1928 index card of the German Association of Typefounders. This association was founded at the beginning of the 20th century and most German type foundries were members. It served to represent their interests in economic, political and legal matters. A secondary source are the Lichte Neuland Cicero letters from the letterpress workshop P98A, Berlin. Koch Lichte Grotesk is available in four fonts: 12 Cicero, 12 Cicero Plain, 12 Cicero Inline and 12 Cicero Line. 10% of licence purchases are deposited each year as flowers on Koch's grave.

The remarkable edition of Das Blumenbuch [The Flower Book] was published several times between 1929 and 1942, from small pocket book editions to precious volumes and portfolios, involving many collaborators, printers and publishers like Mainzer Presse, Ernst-Ludwig-Presse in Darmstadt and Insel-Verlag, Leipzig. Rudolf Koch, explains in a letter that he ‘collected [flowers] at random and without any particular aim. I ketched only the ones which grew in and around Offenbach … This collection is intended to give people a taste of summer while it is winter.’ One member of Koch’s ‘Werkstatt’, the young Fritz Kredel, engraved most of the 250 drawings in pear wood. Online lecture given at ANRT Nancy. With rare and unpublished material from the Klingspor Archives. Courtesy Klingspor Museum, Offenbach am Main.

Until the advent of talking pictures, cinema had been referred to as silent. To compensate for the absence of sound, films were punctuated by numerous ‘intertitles’ containing a fixed text, interspersed among the sequences of moving images. Intertitles could be hand-painted on thick paper or glass plates, using brushes or round-tipped nibs, by teams of letterers capable of producing up to 100 cards a day. Yet today we know almost nothing about these technically gifted craftsmen. However, at the end of the 1910s, in the United States, the name of a technician occasionally appeared in the film credits: that of Victor Vance, a letterer associated with the Warner Bros. studio. His distinctive style of lettering, constant over the years, was based on a virtuosic use of the brush. Considered a ‘title-artist’, he also wrote in 1930 an article on how to paint intertitles. This account sheds valuable and precise light on the methods used to produce intertitles and the way these objects were viewed at the time. Written by Julien Van Anholt and edited by Alice Savoie and Jérôme Knebusch in the Poem Pamphlet series.

Of the display typefaces Rudolf Koch designed, Neuland may have received the most use abroad. But how was it made? A 1922 letter Koch sent to Ernst Kellner provides more questions than answers, and designers have speculated for almost half a century about whether Koch really cut its punches without any preparation. Dan Reynolds’s essay reviews these textual sources, comparing them with surviving process material preserved in the Klingspor Museum and elsewhere. Written by Dan Reynolds and edited by Alice Savoie and Jérôme Knebusch in the Poem Pamphlet series.

La fin du monde [The end of the world] resembles a thistle or a holly branch. During his residency at the Ergastule studios in Nancy, France, Jérôme Knebusch created twelve in a limited edition. All look similar, but none are identical. They were vector drawn, laser cut in brass, manually folded and oxidized in vinegar steam. Six are exclusively available at Poem, six others at Ergastule. The thistle photograph by Emile Gallé is from the École de Nancy archives.