Berlin's Typographic Legacy: Type Specimens

Description

The richness and diversity of typographic culture in Germany in the industrial age is not only reflected in the surviving wood, lead or plastic typefaces and the products made with them, but also in the typefaces that have only survived as proofs, as can be found in thousands of so-called type specimens. These ephemeral sample books or sales catalogs, ranging in size from one sheet to hundreds of pages, were used by type foundries to advertise selected typefaces or to market their entire product portfolio. To showcase the specific character of a font, type specimens comprise fictional advertisements and Dadaist cascades of words.

Although typefaces are often overlooked in their omnipresence in everyday life, the material turn in conjunction with the rise of the digital humanities has also led to a rapid increase in academic interest in typography beyond art history and book studies – particularly on the part of textual materiality research and machine pattern recognition. Moreover, type specimens are of great importance for the creative industries, as even digitally designed fonts are usually derived from historical models. All objects in this dataset come from the collections of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and the Kunstbibliothek – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

The dataset comprises 327 digitized (and partially OCRed) type specimens printed in Berlin during the 19th & the first half of the 20th century.

Dataset Structure

The dataset consists of a single compressed zip file with directories for images and, if existing, full text (full text is available for 205 items). Those directories contain subdirectories which are named using the unique identifier PPN of each digitised item. Furthermore, a .csv file containing metadata for each item is provided. The .csv file contains, in the first column, the PPN of each individual digitised work. The metadata for each work has been extracted from METS/MODS files describing the contents and structure of a digital object published in the digitised collections. 

Funding

The digitization was funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion (Berlin) during a digiS project, "Die Sichtbarmachung des Sichtbaren – Berlins typografisches Kulturerbe im Open Access".