Berthold Block is a sans-serif typeface released by the H. Berthold

foundry A foundry is a factory that produces metal castings. Metals are cast into shapes by melting them into a liquid, pouring the metal into a mold, and removing the mold material after the metal has solidified as it cools. The most common metals ...

in the early twentieth century and intended for display use. Block has a chunky design suitable for headings, with short

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allowing tight linespacing and rounded corners. It is sometimes simply called "Block". Font design expert Stephen Coles describes it as "a soft but substantial

display face A display typeface is a typeface that is intended for use at large sizes for headings, rather than for extended passages of body text. Display typefaces will often have more eccentric and variable designs than the simple, relatively restrained ...

with compact dimensions and an organic appearance… tisn’t meant for body copy." The

Klingspor Museum The Klingspor-Museum is a museum in Offenbach, Germany, specializing in the art of modern book production, typography and type. It includes a collection of fine art books from Karl Klingspor, one of the owners of Klingspor Type Foundry in Of ...

credits it to Hermann Hoffmann, who managed type design for Berthold. The original metal type release of Block was intentionally "distressed" in style, matching the effect of worn type; some re-releases have a cleaner design. Ferdinand Ulrich suggests that this was to match the organic feel of advertising lettering of the time, including the work of Lucian Bernhard. Block was one of Berthold's most popular typefaces, and was released in a wide range of versions, including lighter weights and type in wood (for large sizes). Metal type versions had stylistic alternate characters such as a more compact 'S' to allow fine-tuning of appearance of type and fit the desired number of characters into a line.

History

Berthold Block was released in 1908; Berthold later added additional weights and styles, also releasing

phototypesetting Phototypesetting is a method of setting type. It uses photography to make columns of type on a scroll of photographic paper. It has been made obsolete by the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publishing ( digital typesetting). T ...

versions. Berthold also used the name "Block" for a number of other typefaces not particularly closely related to it as a

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marketing strategy. These included the script font "Block-Signal" and the

blackletter Blackletter (sometimes black letter), also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for the Danish, Norweg ...

Block-Fraktur. Block continued to be popular in the

period; Jens Gehlhaar comments that "with roughened outlines and in bold weights, it was never a candidate for timelessness, but its big x-height and tight fit made it quite popular in 1970s Germany and England." It was often used by

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and by the Whitechapel Art Gallery for branding in the 1970s and 80s. In the late 1970s, Berthold re-released three lighter-weight fonts derived from the Block design as a mini-family named "Berliner Grotesk" for phototypesetting, with the font redraw carried out by Erik Spiekermann.

Digitisations

A variety of digitisations of Block exist, including by Berthold and successor companies and by

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(the condensed weight only). Paratype of Moscow released an expansion with Cyrillic characters in 1997. Matthew Butterick's Hermes, first released by

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and later self-released, is a loose adaptation also inspired by other German

grotesque Since at least the 18th century (in French and German as well as English), grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, mysterious, magnificent, fantastic, hideous, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus ...

typefaces of the period, adding lighter weights and unicase features.

References

{{notelist, 30em

External links

1921 Berthold Block specimen
(digitisation: Stephen Coles)
Fonts In Use
Sans-serif typefaces Display typefaces Berthold typefaces