The Book Club of California celebrated its 235th publication with a lecture tour, of sorts, for members and friends up and down the Golden State during the month of May. Robert Bringhurst’s Palatino: The Natural History of a Typeface is an important and elegantly produced book that is as much about the typographer as it is about the typeface. Hosted at the new Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography at Pasadena’s ArtCenter College of Design, Bringhurst gave an illustrated talk about his book, Hermann Zapf and the typographer’s sixty-year devotion to the Palatino typeface. Spanning the major eras in printing history, Zapf’s compulsion, dictated by his uncompromising attention to detail, resulted in Palatino being designed for foundry type, redesigned for film, and redesigned again for digital typography. Bringhurst’s exploration of these modifications was the impetus for the book and he shared some of the highlights during his lecture. As he explained, he wrote a natural history of a typeface through the life of Hermann Zapf. [Read more]
Jerry Kelly addresses the audience at RIT, showing a photo of Hermann Zapf teaching at RIT ca. 1979. (Emily Hancock)
The Frederic W. Goudy Award for Excellence in Typography was presented to Jerry Kelly on October 24, 2015 as the closing event of the APHA conference at RIT. The Goudy Award is a tradition that is co-sponsored by the Cary Graphic Arts Collection and the RIT School of Media Sciences that honors outstanding practitioners in type design and its related fields. The first Goudy laureate in 1969 was Professor Hermann Zapf, (1918–2015), who later taught at RIT in the 1970s and 80s. It was fitting that the latest Goudy Award should go to one of Zapf’s most successful students, Jerry Kelly, a leading calligrapher, book designer, type designer, and typographer who practices out of New York City. [Read more]
Orbis Typographicus featuring text by Walter Crane & Hippocrates. Typeface: Delphin, Calligraphy by Hermann Zapf, 1980.
Orbis Typographicus is a letterpress portfolio tour de force that was released in 1980 after ten years of close collaboration between Hermann Zapf in Darmstadt and Philip L. Metzger of the Crabgrass Press in Kansas City. This title offers the reader a typographic world that only Professor Zapf could envision: full of alphabets and aphorisms, all handset and exquisitely printed by Metzger in a multitude of styles that make the reader believe that she is party to some wonderful typographic time travel. [Read more]
