The library of the Gutenberg Museum

By Dan ReynoldsI. IntroductionLarge or small, letters seem to inhabit their own universe. Re-arrangeable in any combination, they can spell out all conceivable messages, be they poetic, bureaucratic, or anything in between. But sometimes a text is just about its letters themselves, not an object to be read, but one to be looked at. Type specimens have taken various forms over the centuries, from posters to postcards and from primers to pamphlets. In fact, this web ‘page’ that you are reading now is also a type specimen, at least of some sort. In our digital age, creating type specimens has become easier than ever before. But what did our predecessors do 100 years ago, or even 500 years ago? II. MainzFigure 1: Oversize type specimen from Johann Erasmus Luther’s typefoundry, the Luther’sche Schriftgießerei. Printed in Frankfurt, Germany, 1678. Original size: 43 cm by 28.5 cm. See figure three below for larger detail..For hundreds of years, this small German city along the Rhine has been known for Johannes Gutenberg and his invention — printing with movable metal type. Almost any graphic designer who has passed through Mainz has stopped at the Gutenberg Museum. Next to the city’s landmark Romanesque cathedral, the Gutenberg Museum presents the history of Western (and some Eastern) printing. Several incunabula books are on display — including three Gutenberg Bibles — as well as printing presses and bits of city paraphernalia.Figure 2: 1785–1786 specimen from William Caslon’s foundry in Great Britain (dimensions not recorded by the author). In addition to their famous serif typefaces, the Caslons cut seminal a blackletter type called Caslon Black. This forms a large part of the base of what we refer to as “Old English”-style fonts today. Click image for larger view.Lesser known is the m

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