In some cases, I believe it was more likely that the firms’ punchcutter employees were the ones responsible for bringing the products to their final forms, instead of the external designers or foundry owners, directors, and other staff members. Many collaborating designers would not have been aware of the exact details regarding typeface manufacturing they were not “insiders” in the process, and could only have been responsible for part of a product’s final design. Nevertheless, all collaborators must have been able to offer foundries knowledge that they did not already have institutionally, be that linguistic or stylistic. Not all of the individuals who foundries collaborated with were “artists and designers ” for example, some were academics with experience reading and writing other scripts. The various foundry owners and directors who did this may have been influenced by one another, but by 1900, it was not uncommon in German industrial manufacturing for businesses to collaborate with external artists and designers in this manner. A typefoundry’s products did not necessarily all originate in-house but inside of the firms who did collaborate with external designers, the initiative to do so must have come from the respective company owners and directors, who would have believed that products based on the work of external contributors could prove financially successful, enabling their businesses to grow, and strengthening their “corporate identities” or reputations. To form that narrative, I have used a synecdochic approach, relying on these parts to describe the industry as a whole. The typefaces for which accounts have survived only represent a small fraction of those mentioned in the history that follows. In this research, I have analysed German typefounding in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the surviving process and production drawings made for products, as well as through accounts written by participants involved in these steps. Only on rare occasions were the internal workers within the firms who produced the final forms of the products ever mentioned by name in publications about them, unlike the typefaces’ designers however, from the earliest surviving drawings prepared by those typefaces’ designers, as well as from their written accounts about the type-design and type-making processes, it is clear that the work they submitted to the foundries could not have been implemented exactly as-is. Typefoundries, or the firms who manufactured those products, presented them as collaborations between individual artists and themselves as corporate entities. The abstract for the entire book is as follows: The visual appearances for most of the letterpress-printing typefaces published in Germany during the twentieth century are attributed to specific designers. The PDF includes my dissertation’s front matter and table of contents, etc. This is the first chapter of my doctoral dissertation, written at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig and defended in January 2019.
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