Wallau is a grotesque blackletter typeface family by the German designer

Rudolf Koch Rudolf Koch (20 November 1876 – 9 April 1934) was a German type designer, professor, and a master of lettering, calligraphy, typography and illustration. Commonly known for his typefaces created for the Klingspor Type Foundry, his most widely ...

Description

It features restrained serifs and clear contrasts in line thickness, as if drawn using a broad nib pen, with a mixture of curves and relatively soft breaks in the line forms. In order to be suitable also for body text, it featured simple and open letterforms for easy

legibility Legibility is the ease with which a reader can decode symbols. In addition to written language, it can also refer to behaviour or architecture, for example. From the perspective of communication research, it can be described as a measure of the p ...

History

Over a period of five years, Koch published three weights and a narrow version, starting with semibold in 1930, published by the Klingspor Brothers type foundry in Offenbach. Koch produced two sets of capital letters: one of

roman Roman or Romans most often refers to: *Rome, the capital city of Italy *Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD *Roman people, the people of Roman civilization *Epistle to the Romans, shortened to Romans, a letter w ...

and then also Gothic (“german”) versions. It was named in honour of the printer Heinrich Wallau, who had proposed the concept of doing broken designs based on Rotunda (Rundgotisch) in 1885 and was a friend of one of the foundry owners. Wallau was designed at a time of renewed interest in blackletter type shapes. While Koch was sympathetic to the

Nazi Nazism (), formally named National Socialism (NS; , ), is the far-right politics, far-right Totalitarianism, totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During H ...

cause and the grotesque blackletter category as well as his designs were embraced by the Nazis until they

banned A ban is a formal or informal prohibition of something. Bans are formed for the prohibition of activities within a certain political territory. Some bans in commerce are referred to as embargoes. ''Ban'' is also used as a verb similar in meaning ...

all blackletters in 1941, the publication of the Wallau typeface clearly predated the Nazi regime. It has seen several digital revivals of varying quality and completeness.

Notes and references

{{Reflist, refs= http://gute-schriften.hbksaar.net/wallau/ https://klingspor-museum.de/KlingsporKuenstler/HR_Schriftbuch/HR_Kapitel_W.pdf http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-24807.html https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/31509/wallau Blackletter typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1930 Latin-script typefaces