Wow, those are some particularly crappy alternate digitizations. :o Nice job!

Lovely! I always was fascinated by this Typeface, thanks for the digitalisation.

Today I received the yearbook Caractère Noël from 1957. In this yearbook the first advertising came out for the Calypso. Calypso was launched in 1958. The yearbook of course was published also in 1958 but the work shown in the book should be dated 1957. Enclosed two pictures from the advert, one with a transparant page in front. Probably the airbrushed and shaded 'C' was the original for this character on which the dot screen was based.

Very impressive. Your dedication is commendable! And that photo of the metal version is amazing. BTW did you try scanning the original (maybe after inking the face) instead of photographing it? I would think the latter method would introduce parallax. And what was the effective resolution of the photos?

BTW, a side question: do you know whether Monotype (via Linotype) now owns the rights to Calypso?

hhp

We did not scan it. I think that inking (or like they did it in earlier years blackening it with a candle) would not make a better image but I did not try it. We have corrected the pictures parallax and because we made a grid (look at our YouTube video) and the fact that this grid fitted on each character we presumed that we corrected the parallax. The Micro Nikkor we used is not a zoom lens so has not much deformation in the lenses so I think that it is quite accurate. The Nikon D800 has a 36 megapixel resolution and is by that almost a scanner (almost 100MB files). You have to remember that the drawings by Almeida where of course made by hand and so was also the following of the contours on the pantograph done by hand. So in that stage there is also some inaccuracy. I think also that their goal the mechanical look was and not a handmade look. We considered to scan it on our Epson V750 Pro which is also a top scanner but also works with lenses (deformation). My other consideration was that you can create shadow and a sharper difference between side and top of the metal letter with photography while a scanner does not create shadow because the light source is almost where the scan unit is.

I think that Monotype has officially the rights after Olive, Haas, Stempel, Linotype and Heidelberg. But the Profonts Calypso was also not published by Monotype (and the Calypso Boy was also a private project). When Monotype makes a better one I will take it of the website of course. The only goal is to have a proper and usable Calypso.

Great explanations, thanks.

hhp

Thanks for the font, I'll use it somehow somewhere it has a nice depth to it.

n.

Don't get me wrong about the legal rights of intellectual property. All the fonts we use in our commercial projects of Polka Design and Fontana Publishers are bought and licenses are paid. The making of the Calypso is a tribute to Excoffon and has to be seen like that. The license holders have had more than twenty years to publish a good digital font but decided, I think on commercial grounds, that it was not interesting enough to do so. On the other hand I think that the legacy of Excoffon and Almeida is important to the typographical community and for young students that have to be confronted with the mind set of designers like Excoffon.

I'm certainly no fan of squatting myself. As long as people are warned.

hhp

I now see that I forgot to mention the link to the YouTube video from 'The making of Calypso', Sorry for that! It makes clear how we worked on the pictures from the metal type with the grid.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTbwg7Sz4Xc

I corrected this link so now it should work!

Joep: Awesome work! Congrats!

Very well done. You've got some distortions to small curves in the small white spaces, and a few outline overlaps that will cause knockouts in some renderers. For a design like this, I would have favoured PostScript over TrueType, I think. But overall this is very effective, and certainly a lot better than the other digitisations.

It is a complicated discussion about licenses and intellectual property. There are always two parties involved. One is the holder of the rights and one is the maker of the work and his or her heritage. Just like paintings and other art the common opinion among collectors and museums is that you may buy a work of Van Gogh for several millions but you never own it. You pass it through to the next generation and you even have the obligation to take good care of it. Some time ago a Japanese businessman had put in his will that he wanted to take his painting of Van Gogh with him in his grave. Legally it was not possible to do so because of the reason stated above. It was public heritage. I think that Excoffons work belongs to our graphic heritage and that it has to be excessible for study and use. Preferrable by the rights owner of course.

You are right John. There are still some design flaws in our Calypso. Anchor points can still be reduced and there are some overlaps. We will make the font better in the coming time but I think that this still is a big step from what we had. We tested it and we had no problems with it.

This macro can help you to find and remove overlaps:
http://typophile.com/node/84799#comment-476051

Thankyou Pablo for your input to remove overlaps.

About the copyright of the typefaces from Olive, I found info in the book 'Roger Excoffon et la Fonderie Olive'. On page 67 the following is mentioned: Haas did not obtain the copyright for the typefaces but was granted the permission to cast selected typefaces. Therefore Olive sold the casting machines, pantographs, matrices and 100 tons of typefaces to Haas. Until his death in 1990, Marcel Olive retained control over the rights of the typefaces. He granted several foundries the non-exclusive reproduction of typefaces. Among them: Bobst, Compugraphic, Itek, Mecanorma, Letraset, Hewlett Packard, Linotype, Agfa, Adobe and Scangraphic. This information is said to be found in the archives of Marcel Olive (as mentioned in this publication).

If so, Olive's heirs might still own the rights.

hhp

this is fabulous, I've been waiting for this so long I can't remember what I wanted it for. ;)

John: "...and a few outline overlaps that will cause knockouts in some renderers. For a design like this, I would have favoured PostScript over TrueType, I think."

I think, if a design has overlaps, the only format with overlapping contours legal in the spec, is TT. Removing overlaps in a design like this to assure correct PS output could introduce distortions in scaling.

Yes, they might still be owners but on the internet you can not find anything about it. Though, interesting is also the statement on the site from Jean Francois Porchez from 2005. According to this page he acquired Fonderie Olive ...
">http://typofonderie.com/gazette/post/porchez-typofonderie-acquire-fonder...

bbg: ‘I think, if a design has overlaps, the only format with overlapping contours legal in the spec, is TT. Removing overlaps in a design like this to assure correct PS output could introduce distortions in scaling.’

Why scale down? You can do an OpenType font with PS outlines and leave the PPEM at 2048. FF DIN Round has a ppem size of 2000 units/em. During testing it in 2010 one of the PDF-Writers made a mistake because the programers had forgotten to look into the FontMatrix. They had simply assumed that TT-flavoured OTF is always 2048 and PS-flavoured OTF is 1000 units/em. Luckily they took notice of this and updated their PDF writer. AFAIK, FF DIN Round has never caused any trouble ever since. Adobe also produces Arabic OTFs with a ppem-size of 2048 units, so there are at least two manufacturers which took care that the pavement has been cleaned. So my advice is to stay with PS outlines, remove the overlaps and avoid scaling trouble by sticking with the ppem-size of 2048 units/em. I think that users who import your outlines in Illustrator will appreciate that too.

polkawithfontana on 10 Apr 2013 — 12:44am:
‘According to this page he acquired Fonderie Olive ...’

To good to be true … you should have posted this 10 days ago :–)

"Why scale down?,

AJ, I did not suggest scaling the em in the development process. My comment was related to the scaling done during use, which is as likely to be down as up. So, go back and think about the removal of overlap when not required, and what that would do to hundreds of previously perfect circles, now conglomerated into point lumps, then scaled during use.:)

bbg: ‘hundreds of previously perfect circles’

You are right, even when one would stay with ppem 2048, removing the overlaps would cause a lot of extra trouble. I have seen TT fonts with overlapping outlines (Ccedilla) causing incorrect (PS?) output though, so at least some testing and a closer look at rendering methods might be useful in order to get a clearer picture of the pros and cons.

Joep, as we say in American: same difference. :-) I don't see how nothing being on the Internet and/or somebody else claiming ownership changes anything.

Luckily they took notice of this and updated their PDF writer.

What if they don't?
In the user's view the blame always goes to the font.

BTW is the assumption that a TT font must be 2048 rarer than the assumption that a PS font must be 1000?

hhp

What if they don't?
In the user's view the blame always goes to the font.

Ask the users of XeTeX, they have a 4-year-old filed bug about this issue: http://sourceforge.net/p/xetex/bugs/23/ – it doesn’t seem to be that urgent ;)

BTW is the assumption that a TT font must be 2048 rarer than the assumption that a PS font must be 1000?

From my anecdotal evidence, yes. TTF seem to work anywhere with any upm (allowed are 16—16384)*. For a typeface like Calypso I’d have gone for at least 4096, because you can see in the 1000 upm version the circles can’t be constructed very faithfully.

* There are some issues in Word on Windows with high upm + high coordinate values (very wide glyphs), the font smoothing is disabled in this combination.

According to this page he acquired Fonderie Olive ...
http://typofonderie.com/gazette/post/porchez-typofonderie-acquire-fonder...

It WAS dated April 1… So…

Just like Albert Jan Pool you are fully awake ...

>Joep, as we say in American: same difference. :-) I don't see how nothing being on the Internet and/or somebody else claiming ownership changes anything.<

Hello Hrant, my answer to that I gave before: >I think that Excoffons work belongs to our graphic heritage and that it has to be excessible for study and use. Preferrable by the rights owner of course.<
As long as this is not the case our effort should serve the ones who wants to study and use it. However, I understand the point you are making ;-)

As suggested I tried to scan the metal type on a resolution of 4800 dpi to see if it is better than the pictures that I used made with the Micro Nikkor and Nikon D800. The scan is sharper but does not give more detail. I think because it is already an enlargement and I have reached the (lack of) sharpness of the casting.

The one on the left is sharper, and probably usably so. Is it the scan?

I have reached the (lack of) sharpness of the casting.

I don't know - type metal molecules are pretty small. :-)
But of course there were/are coarser limits in the production process. What's the coarsest limit, the pantograph? BTW what point size was the metal type you used?

BTW, those close-ups make this project doubly fascinating. If I were you I would send presentation proposals here:
http://www.atypi.org/atypi-amsterdam-2013
http://www.typecon.com/archives/2603

hhp

Hrant, the one on the left is from the Nikon D800. This is the 24 pt version of Calypso. I am considering buying the 36 pt version, the largest one ever casted. But that is a big investment.
Maybe you get some loss from punch to matrix and from matrix to letter. It could also be that you loose some sharpness when a lot of letters are made in the same matrix. But I think that Calypso is not cast in the same quantity as Times New Roman :-)
I will look at your links. Shortly I will get also a Letraset sheet with a 72 pt version of Calypso. I hope that I still can rub it down. I will make some pictures of it as soon as it arrives!

Huh, the camera is better!

I highly doubt they only used punches for Calypso - there are too many things stacked against that possibility. They probably used some sort of pantograph (in fact maybe that constituted the Olive foundry's technical superiority that allowed the production of Calypso) and the limit there was the size of the cutter (which IIRC is on the order of 1/500 inches for the smallest one*). What's interesting here is that a pantograph's cutter is circular... a perfect fit for Calypso! No loss of "resolution" due to the size of the cutter, if you cut directly into the matrix. However I'm not sure how the "shearing" of the circles (by the swooping curves) would end up working in such an approach... Maybe there was another step (actually there might have had to be two, two back to "negative" after a "positive") before the matrix.

* They used bigger ones for clearing out large patches first (without breakage) then switched to a small one for details.

Related: http://typophile.com/node/1083?page=1
See for example the last image there.

Letraset: Do you have to rub it down to scan/photograph it? BTW another angle might be phototype - did Calypso ever have a photo version?

hhp

The Letraset version should be an interesting comparison. They normally did the production artwork at several inches tall cut in Rubylith film.

Also, you wouldn't necessarily need to rub it down—just photograph or scan the reverse side of the sheet and flop the image.

What's the coarsest limit, the pantograph?

Several manufacturers were in the habit of handing out promotional souvenirs with the Lord’s Prayer engraved on a single 6-, 8-, or 12-pt em square, cut with a Benton punchcutter and cast as a type sort, as a demonstration of technical prowess. I’ve heard of these from ATF, Monotype, and Linotype. There may have been others.

Kent, is this what you mean?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lumixpics/7590768386/in/photostream/

Kent, thanks for that reminder.

So I took some measurements in Photoshop and the smallest visible feature in that sort on Flickr (which I think is the closed counter of the "A") is about 0.7% of the Em. If the Em there is 4mm that comes out to just over 1/1,000 inches. So twice the resolution that Giampa states in that other thread. But still much coarser than Joep's scanner or camera.

Now, 4mm is about 11pt - presumable it was actually 12pt. If they did go down to 6pt that doubles the resolution. However we don't know if things like the counter of the "A" survived at 6pt. And 2000 dpi is still less than half the resolution Joep is working with.

Also, it's possible they used an especially thin cutter for that project - so thin as to break too often to be practical for real work.

hhp

Here is the one from Haas. It is the Gutenberg song (Gutenberglied) engraved on a 12-pt em-square. I placed a match under it to compare the size. They called it 'Ein Wunder des Schriftgusses' (A miracle in typecasting). It has 357 characters. I believe that it was made for the 400 year existence of Haas in 1969. At that time they had taken over the casting activities of Deberny & Peignot, Olive, Berthold and Stempel.

I don't know if Calypso was made for phototype. I doubt it. In the list of sold material to Haas when Olive stopped in 1979 only metal type equipment was listed. But already in 1974 an number of major foundries approached Olive to adapt types for phototypesetting. In 'Roger Excoffon et la Fonderie Olive' several typefaces are mentioned to be published for phototyepsetting, of course Antique Olive (a.o. by Monotype) but also Mistral (by Itek) and Banco.

The Haas one looks comparable to me.

Something to repeat/clarify though: if you're cutting shapes with no tight corners (i.e. Calypso's circles) the size of the pantograph's cutter is irrelevant (as long as it fits inside).

hhp

polkawithfontana, that Gutenberglied thing is friggin awesome!

n.

Calypso was available at Photo-Lettering and VGC (and Castcraft) according to Hans Reichardt.

Of course it was! And it was made exactly the same way every other film or metal face was made at that time. The idea that they would triple or quadruple the costs by any deviation from the norm, is invented here for the first time.

Oh, and there is also a “line”-version of Calypso by Marty Bee as sighted by Florian in Berlin.

David, if anybody's guesswork is wrong please explain how it's wrong, so we can learn. And -as Joep reminds us- the Olive foundry had a technical advantage over its competitors (that in fact it wanted to flaunt via Calypso) so not everybody could have been doing it "exactly the same way". BTW the point of that line of discussion came from Joep's "I have reached the (lack of) sharpness of the casting."

Indra: The line version is cool. Fewer points! (Although that's not relevant to film.)

hhp

The line-version is digital.

YouTube video is marked as private.

Hard to tell which came first - but the Marty Bee 'Line version' is internally identical to Rafael Dinner's "Stiletto Silver" who also did a "Stiletto Black". Both can be seen here. - Herb

Joe, this one (from the site) works:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTbwg7Sz4Xc

HVB: Indeed the "O" (and some other glyphs) in Stiletto Silver seems to have the same problem (although I guess it could be a feature) as the one in in Indra's link.

hhp

Something to repeat/clarify though: if you're cutting shapes with no tight corners (i.e. Calypso's circles) the size of the pantograph's cutter is irrelevant (as long as it fits inside).

But look carefully: In every glyph of Calypso, at some point in the darkening, the circles start to overlap, producing negative squarish white space with quite sharp corners.

Ah, you're right. So maybe the pantograph (assuming they did use it) was the "resolution bottleneck" after all.

A key thing to nail down would be exactly what Olive's technical superiority was.

hhp

Amazing amount of work for no compensation?

Indra, thanks for pointing to a line version. Another attempt was made by Marty Pfeiffer and the name of his project is Belafonte. He made a digital shaded version of Calypso and a line version. Enclosed both pictures. The project can be downloaded on his site: http://www.scootergraphics.com/index.html (at least I did ...)

Something seems to be wrong with the download. Has anyone else had a problem?

Awesome chromatic layering possibilities.

Chris: Joep doesn't want to make money off of something that doesn't belong [only] to him. On the other hand it might have been [even] better to sell it and donate the money in an honorable way.

hhp

I will check the download Chris ...

I understand that, Hrant. I was just hoping he had a grant from someone to finance the work.

Thanks for posting those pictures of highly accurate pantographic punch cutting demos. I've never seen those and miss Benton's dearly. I'm sure it was the best in field.

Hrant "David, if anybody's guesswork is wrong please explain how it's wrong, so we can learn. And -as Joep reminds us- the Olive foundry had a technical advantage over its competitors "

Is that required, no matter how ridiculous the guess, or how persistent the insistence? and, is Joep "reminding us" of a fact, or a claim?

So, let me put it this way — the "exactly the same way" above means drawing negative (wrong reading), patterning positive (right reading), punch cutting negative, matricing positive, type casting negative, so one can be printing positive.

The first three steps, where a pantograph may be used without recklessly abandoning economic sense, are only constrained by the required result, not the tool. The Calypso producer had access to the final design, (per letter), in the drawing, the patterning, and the punch cutting. So, some letters might have been drawn exactly to the punch, and others you would only recognize completely as a punch.

But ultimately there is not restriction on what a skilled one with a hand tool and zoom capabilites could do to the punch. This has been discussed several times here.

I think, you were suggesting that they drew Calypso positive, patterned negative, skipped punch cutting, and cut thousands of matrices directly via an undisclosed direct matrix cutting process that left the face clear? Is that it? Besides showing me the shape of the cutting head, Why? What would make a founder abandon a normally barely profitable process as it was, for a rare display face they could do the exact same way as everything else with no apparent problem?

Believe it or not, Hrant, there is nothing unique in the history of type, to be found in Calypso except for Calypso itself. There is no little space, no little shape, and no mystery combination of them that had not been punch cut before, though in different combinations than those that yielded Calypso.

Hope that helps.

You're not required to educate. But assuming that everybody but me knows all the answers is irrational. And I don't see how my guesses are "ridiculous"; they're based on my years of listening to experts and my -limited- experience using a pantograph (at Rimmer's studio). Could I be wrong? Duh. But guessing is all I can do, and "ridiculous" is mean-spirited hyperbole. That said, I do appreciate you taking the time to explain your thoughts.

I chose the word "remind" carefully. Do you think Chamaret, Gineste, Morlighem and Rault are all wrong to trust their sources? If not, what was that technical superiority?

there is not restriction on what a skilled one with a hand tool and zoom capabilites could do to the punch.

The diameter of the pantograph's cutter is a restriction. Did they not use one? If you're saying they cleaned up after the pantograph (like that one guy in the Tetterode photo at the end of that thread I linked to) wouldn't time be a restriction? There's a reason that guy ended up losing his job... And remember that Excoffon was all about speed, for example producing Banco in two months.

Using a pantograph to directly cut a matrix (without making punches) is not mysterious; it's something little ol' me has done under Rimmer's guidance:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/48413419@N00/4099731186/in/set-721576226680...

What I'm suspecting is there was some kind of twist to the conventional production you describe in order to get Calypso's sharpness of both inside and outside corners. But I admit I haven't yet taken the time to fully wrap my head around that idea. Luckily being wrong in public is the fastest way to learn!

cut thousands of matrices

Why thousands?
And why would the punches be far fewer? It's not like any design element in Calypso can be reused.

there is nothing unique in the history of type

Unless we're using a contrived definition of "unique", I don't buy that at all. Even if we're limiting it to manufacturing technology, there have been periodic inventions that have qualitatively changed some aspect of the result. The invention of the pantograph is an obvious big example; it caused the demotion of optical scaling (no matter how hard the Bentons tried to educate people).

hhp

Joep: I couldn't find those images or anything similar at scootergraphics ... no hits on finding Belafonte. All I found was a demo version of Calypso Boy.
- Herb

Hrant, Jim cut matrices rather than punches because he was making small amounts of type for his own use, used a display caster that took a particular kind of thin brass matrix, and lacked the machinery for finishing punched matrices. His workshop process was a craft one, not an industrial one. A commercial foundry producing type in volume for sale would need mechanisms to produce multiple matrices, which is where the punch comes in: it provides the master that you only need to cut once, from which you can produce any number of matrices. The largest number of matrices would, of course, be required for hot metal systems, in which the matrices were the font. But even for foundry type you'd want to be able to produce more than one matrix for each character.

Herb, I made a mistake thinking it was from Marty Pfeiffer. Sorry! It is an open source experiment from Loic Sander from March 2011 and as far I know (see link) you can download it there. Check out his blog on typography and other stuff, it is nice!
http://www.akalollip.com/blog/?m=201103&lang=en

Nice that Hrant mentioned Jim Rimmer. Sadly he died in 2010 but Richard Kegler from P22 made a fantastic film of his work before he died and released it in 2011: http://www.p22.com/products/makingfaces.html
With the film comes a metal type of a 'k'. Its production can be seen on the DVD. Buy it! You can also see in the film the principle of working with a pantograph. I compiled some pictures (stills from the film) so you can see the process. In the first picture you can see the stages from hand drawn original to an outline made in Ikarus software, a cut out original for the pantograph, an engraved matrix half the size and a matrix (copper) that is again made from the first matrix that is fifteen times smaller. In that small matrix he has cast the 'k' that can be seen in the last picture photographed from the metal type that is supplied with the DVD. I have visualised some stages (not all) so you can see the process. In the second picture from below you can see on the left the guiding pin and on the right the engraving tool that is very sharp and that can make very detailed engravings. However you can also see the toolmarks it leaves on the surface of the casted metal type below. When he had made a punch he could have smoothened the surface and the result had been smoother on top of the metal type. This is the 'lack of sharpness' due to the mechanical process I talked about before. It has also influence on the contours of course and not only on the surface.

Chris, we checked the dowload but it seems to work here. Please let me know when it doesn't ...

Poking about on the åkaløllip blog landed me this: http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/profonts/calypso/

The Profonts digitization was listed in Joep’s original post, with the drawing quality quite visible ;)

John: AFAIK you only need to make multiple sets of matrices if you're selling the matrices (and not just cast fonts). Did Olive sell Calypso matrices? I thought that sort of think was limited to punchcutters who didn't cast their own type (and yes, hotmetal necessarily). But I can certainly appreciate that Rimmer's production was not industrial-grade.

And/but here's the thing: Do you think a Calypso punch could have been producible with the conventional method (which is what I'm presuming Olive's competitors were stuck with, hence couldn't have made Calypso). Aren't the details (which as Craig pointed out are at both the "positive" and "negative" sides) too fine/labor-intensive to have been made by a pantograph + manual cleanup only at the punchcutting stage? Maybe it was done at two stages - one positive, one negative?

The main things I'm after:
- Is the claim that Olive had some critical technical advantage bogus?
- What could have been the "resolution" limit of Calypso?

Joep, nice stills.

This is the 'lack of sharpness' due to the mechanical process I talked about before.

But -as John implies- how much of that could have been the case at Olive?

hhp

All free Download ................... What's tips ?

John : "A commercial foundry producing type in volume for sale would need mechanisms to produce multiple matrices, which is where the punch comes in"

And in the unlikely event someone is making commercial type without punches, then how many matrices would they need? The type wouldn't even need to leave a foundry to become unsupportable without punches with less then 3-4 sets of matrices, just for Paris.

"However you can also see the toolmarks it leaves on the surface of the casted metal type below."

Oops, i see the router bit too. That ain't workin', its not the way one normally does it, even if one is forced to.

"And remember that Excoffon was all about speed, for example producing Banco in two months."

Really strange for a guy on speed to design a font like Calypso. You have proof that he was always on speed, or was it just on the way to the Banco?

Thanks, Joep!
I got it from your email.
I just checked the link and it now works just fine.

bbg, you must not forget that Excoffon was an art director. The main drawing and testing was done by Olive Studio with José Almeida as head of the studio. Excoffon 'only' drew the outlines (of course for this a lot of vision was required) and Excoffon left the complex shading and dot screen testing to Almeida and his team.

Speed: I wasn't there, but if you read the book(s) it seems pretty convincing.

On the other hand, as Joep reminds :-) us it's possible Excoffon went fast because others were doing the slow grunt work.

hhp

Joep, I'm not forgetting anything yet. ;) I know "Excoffon's speed" and that of the foundry producing his types, and... that they are two separate issues. But just for pretend, if foundry said "Whooooa il cow-boy, qu'en est-il de tous ces points minuscules proposées!?" and Excoffon suggested "Eh, sauter les poinçons de vitesse!", what do you think the foundry would say?

Dans le même temps,
"- Is the claim that Olive had some critical technical advantage bogus?"
Oui. Et je sais pourquoi vous ne connaissez pas, ou pourquoi vous ne voulez pas savoir ce que je sais.

"- What could have been the "resolution" limit of Calypso?"
En plus de la meilleure réponse, "none" la meilleure réponse suivante est "Tout ce que vous voulez qu'il ont été", pour prouver qu'ils n'auraient pas pu le faire sans vos "découvertes".

Sounds nicer, right?

Nah, caustic, unwarranted ridicule sounds about the same in any language. You refuse to believe that my main reason for being here -and there- is to learn (which is something I've been doing from day one). Your loss.

So David thinks that Olive had no technical advantage over its competitors that made the production of Calypso anything special. I think that's entirely possible. But that does mean: some people, somewhere, lied; and the authors of the two recent Excoffon books (not to mention a bunch of other previous authors) were duped.

David also thinks that Joep and I are wrong that Calypso might have had a "resolution limit" (at least below the scanner/camera used) even though a pantograph was -presumably- used (which is only done to save time, and not cleaning up after it saves more time). This I find harder to agree with.

You heard it here first, thanks in large part to my ridiculous, persistent insistence... :-)

So, as an aside, I have to wonder what's worse: My willingness to have my catalytic speculation be misconstrued as "insight posturing", for the sake of learning more stuff faster? Or the fact that most people only share their insights for proving others wrong?

hhp

BTW, I'm still trying to figure out what to make of something in Joep's comparison/macro of April 10: the neck has a peculiar attribute - it's nicely conical a bit below the face, but deeper in it changes into a cool geologic-looking fragmented structure (very visible in the camera/left) one. How does that happen? It's almost like the dots were individually made with punches (driven to differing depths). But that might make no sense, technically or effortwise.

hhp

"..some people, somewhere, lied.."
Don't bother me, I'm trying to figure out if "Tide gets clothes cleaner".

Sooo... You think a revolutionary founding invention so remarkable as to make Calypso possible, died with Olive. He had no interest in selling it, or licensing it, or doing anything but burying it. He didn't even patent it. And at the same time, companies like Linotype, Monotype, Stemple, and every other foundry in the world knew from the advertising, but said, "Okay, whatever". I look forward to you forgetting all about this by next week, with your usual "follow through."

"You refuse to believe that my main reason for being here -and there- is to learn... for the sake of learning more stuff faster."

It's lazy as you seldom follow through, absorb or reload, but I don't refuse, agree, or have any opinion on "why you is here", much less "what you is doing."

"...most people only share their insights for proving others wrong?"

Fortunately, I don't have to do so alone.

No, I just think there might be something we might take for granted now that Olive had but its competitors (remember, post-war France) didn't. Could it have simply been the pantograph? Dunno. The alternative is your liars and dupes. Which, like I said, is not impossible. But that idea wouldn't have come out -in public- without both of us. Appreciate that. And hope that the Excoffon/Olive aficionados will take note and react.

I do have too many interests to be able to follow through with enough of them; most of all it's hard to make money with cultural progress - as I'm sure you can attest yourself bringing home the bacon usually involves much more boring stuff (coincidentally as Excoffon himself once said). But I wouldn't trade too many interests for too few. And I wouldn't trade publicly contemplating ideas for making yet another font that a corporation can use to dupe people into buying its junk. This is partly because that's just how I'm made (which means there's no use criticizing it - I'm not criticizing your make-up or life goals); but also because it's not just about me, it's about us: I give people ideas (and I appreciate receiving them).

BTW am I the one hijacking a thread with personal attacks?

hhp

Has anyone ever seen a design made with Calypso? Beside the specimen from Olive of course. Or is it a ghost ...
A typeface made by Excoffon but to much Excoffon?

In the Linotype Typeview Font Catalog 5.0 (1988) the source for fonts like Choc and Mistral is numbered 13. 13 belongs to M. Olive Marseille France. At Tetterode/Lettergieterij Amsterdam we licensed the conventional Mistral from Olive.

Joep wrote on April 11:
> Here is the one from Haas. It is the Gutenberg song (Gutenberglied)
> engraved on a 12-pt em-square.
> They called it 'Ein Wunder des Schriftgusses' (A miracle in typecasting).
> It has 357 characters. I believe that it was made for the 400 year
> existence of Haas in 1969.

Tetterode/Lettergieterij Amsterdam made the Lord's Prayer (Onze Vader) in 1951 (100 year existence) in 7 different languages. It was a 10 point em and the average number of characters was 350! The book they made in 1951 (16 pages) is on sale in Germany.

Joep, not a ghost, a halo. :-)
http://www.waywordradio.org/halo_car/
You don't make real money selling it, you use it to sell the normal stuff more. Like the Audi R8. Calypso's weak market penetration actually reinforces the view that it was mostly seen as a way of flaunting Olive's -now disputed- technical superiority. At least if you buy into the generally accepted idea that Marcel Olive was very good at gauging sales potential; because it could simply have been a flop... and maybe that's when they invented its halo as its raison d'être! :-)

Henk, nice to see you back! Question: is there a way to measure the smallest feature of that Tetterode sort? It would be nice to figure out what was the smallest pantograph cutter that they/people used. Is Giampa's claim of 1/500 inches accurate?

hhp

With regard to 'technical superiority', what is claimed? A mechanical advantage? A process? A technical advantage? A financial advantage (they could afford to spend more time)?

The idea of Calypso as a technical showpiece makes sense to me: it's surely a typeface of limited application -- how many jobs would call for such a design? and after it had been used a few prominent projects, would anyone else want to use it? these are the problems of all strongly flavoured display types --, but it's visually so impressive and its materiel so unlike anything else that compositors would be handling. Perhaps this is where 'technical superiority' lies, not in any superiority of technique or process, but simply in being able to say 'Look what we can make that no one else has made'.

Hrant, if you seriously want to know what the lower limit of a pantograph cutter is, why don't you contact one of the numerous companies that make, sell or use such equipment?

What about the shaded types that ATF did back around 1900? Surely those were at least as detailed as Calypso. Or perhaps those were produced by some other means?

I'm not familiar with those, Mark. Are they in the 1923 specimen?

John, here's my translation* from Rault's book: "Marcel Olive, a commercial genius, commissioned it not because of its aesthetic attributes but because at that time only the Olive foundry had the technical means necessary to create such a typeface with hatched surfaces, making it a global benchmark for such a venture." So no detailed explanation, but a pretty firm claim, especially coming directly from a straight-shooter like Excoffon. Marcel Olive, I would expect to "embellish" the facts for appearances - but not Excoffon.

* For reference here's the original French: "Marcel Olive, qui avait le génie du commerce, me le commanda non pour ses qualités esthétiques mais parce qu’à cette époque, seule la fonderie Olive avait les moyens techniques nécessaires à la conception de ce type de caractère, avec ses surfaces tramées ; lequel devenait alors une référence mondiale pour son entreprise."

If the above is true, it goes beyond the simple "design novelty" that you're -understandably- speculating. Another reason it was probably not merely design novelty is that those foundries were notorious for copying each other's ideas: we would likely have seen something like Calypso produced by Olive's arch-rivals D&P soon afterwards, but there's nothing. So maybe Olive produced Calypso because it was beyond being copied.

Pantograph limits: From what I know its use in type was particular enough that I'm not sure I could trust any generic/official numbers. For example a manufacturer might say they have a 1/4000 inch cutter, without realizing/admitting that it would be too brittle (and maybe too labor-intensive) for type production; I remember breaking a not-particularly-small cutter at Rimmer's studio (although of course most of that was inexperience). Plus we're talking about pantographs 50+ years ago; I have to assume precision and materials have improved. So I think it remains that asking people here (and probably on ATypI) is a potentially fruitful avenue.

Mark, what's the most elaborate such design? But here's the thing: ATF was not in France.

hhp

I think Mark means typefaces like this in the 1912 ATF catalogue. This is the Engravers Shaded in 6 pt version. The typometer on the left has a 0,5 mm increment. By the way, it is the etched and sandblasted metal version of the typometer that comes with Letter Fountain that I produced in a limited version in the nineties (http://www.flickr.com/photos/66045789@N06/6011792840/). It was called Mackie M.

By the way, Hrant, thanks for your correction on the Ghost/Halo stuff. Halo is much better!

Hrant: "And I wouldn't trade publicly contemplating ideas for making yet another font that a corporation can use to dupe people into buying its junk."

Yet here you are, trading ideas about a font company that made a font they can use to dupe corporations into using it to dupe people into buying, believing, or understand junk.

Mark: "Surely those were at least as detailed as Calypso..."

I'm sure there are plenty.

The width of the smallest router used is the tool's limit, but not strictly the limit of the process. In some versions of the process, touch up a six-pattern, a punch, or ten punches, or all the hairlines of the U.C. patterns. In other versions of the process the router was twice the end, as the "success" of the process was judged by getting from one letter drawing to several sizes of patterns and or punches without any manual intervention other than adjustments to the pantograph, and following the drawing and the pattern dutifully.

These latter fonts usually were not such great junk, but they were being used primarily for smaller size junk in more insideous mass media duping, like newspapers, magazines and other free press activities. But the longer a Merg-like junk producer had to futz with the process, the closer they could get to better junk like Benton's. So by the time of founding of the font in question on this thread, most big founders were capable of many different qualities of junk, using a variety of possible duping processes.

Clearly, underlying all of this is that we are discussing a founding period not far removed from a war France had begun as an horse-powered, fort-seeking, agricultural nation, and ended understanding that they had to be on the road to the high tech nation they are today, or get clobbered every 20 years by a gas-powered, blitzkrieging, industrial "neighbor". I think maybe there was no invention here other than there were few better ways to say, "We're back", than Calypso.

Joep, thanks for that photo. I'll take some measurements now...

David, you know very well that my speculative efforts concerning an archaic production process (with the goal of understanding it better) will not help anybody sell anything; I contrast such stimulating cultural activity with ho-hum financial activity (with everybody striking a different personal balance between them).

You might have reason to think Excoffon was lying; I instead suspect -that's all- that we are still missing a piece of the puzzle (which might simply involve a deficiency among Olive's competitors rather than an exceptional technology at Olive). The most practical way to reveal this potentially missing piece is what I've been doing.

The width of the smallest router used is the tool's limit, but not strictly the limit of the process.

Indeed, and that's something I've referred to (for example via that Tetterode photo) a few times here. However once people have started paddling down the pantograph river they have often given up on using their oars for small course corrections and simply gone with the flow, even when they could tell the output was being visibly degraded. So you could call it the "spiritual limit" of the process; and that's where the minimum -viable- size of the pantograph's cutter stands up from the crowd of other factors (when it comes to nailing down Joep's "(lack of) sharpness of the casting").

As for Calypso being a "we're back", I think by that time: the French had already rebuilt their confidence, and developed their -sometimes grating- "we don't need to prove anything to other people, they need to prove it to us" attitude; Mistral -and other designs- had already done all the necessary proving, with foreign font houses eagerly licensing it.

hhp

I know this is pretty crude stuff but: in that photo the white parts of the hatching have a thickness of about 3-4 mils; the black parts are about 1-2 mils (with a mil being 1/1000 inches). The former would be the relevant one if the pantograph was used on the punch (a positive).

To rephrase what I wrote in my response to John: coming up with such numbers doesn't indicate the theoretical limits of a punchcutter, but hopefully it does help reveal some sort of practical limit.

hhp

My guess is that the 'handy-est' way to produce something like this would be a combination of photographic etching and subsequent routing (pantographic, or whatever). Since no one has posited this method yet, I would like to put it up. (This method would account for the so called impossible inner corners.)

BTW This theory is based on a project I did in 1976 with the help of a local lithographer, involving screened material.

Hrant, thanks for the translation. But it seems to me that Excoffon's comment does not answer any of my queries, because it does not indicate a specific mechanical advantage, or a unique process, but only that 'at that time only the Olive foundry had the technical means necessary to create such a typeface'. That could mean almost anything, even a comment on the technical experience and skill of Fonderie Olive's technical staff vs that of their competitors. And how did Excoffon know this? Had he shopped the design around other foundries? Had he been told 'Oh, that's too difficult for us'?

Bert, I was wondering about chemical etching technologies, and wondering if they'd ever been used in the production of type. It seems to me unlikely because of the issue of depth, but I was considering etching of patterns or matrices, and perhaps you are thinking of punch production?

Today I received the Letraset sheet with 72 pt Calypso lettering. Brilliant! I have to thank graphic designer Thomas Fischer-Stumm from Germany who send it to me for free out of a stack of 500+ Letraset sheets with different typefaces he was selling through Ebay. I have to thank him to search through that huge amount of sheets and finding this Calypso sheet. I even found my Mecanorma rub down tool I had preserved for so many years. But I really doubt if I am gonna use it or keep the sheet as it is ...

how did Excoffon know this?

I'm guessing the French foundry scene was a small world. Plus he was good at "espionage" - here's another passage from Rault: "We learned that the Deberny & Peignot foundry was preparing a new advertising typeface by Jacno. An article with a photo showing Jacno drawing his alphabet had appeared in a trade magazine. I’m going to be honest: I carried out industrial spying – I took my magnifying glass and examined that photo as carefully as possible. The print quality wasn’t very good; nonetheless I formed an opinion on the alphabet style." But I certainly agree that it's not all clear enough.

Joep: Nice!

hhp

So posting the link was a stupid idea. Won't be my last stupid idea, I'm afraid.

Hrant: “Mistral -and other designs- had already done all the necessary proving”

Apparently not. The claims that were made about this font, were not made about those fonts. The previous fonts had been design problems, while Calypso was a production issue from the sketches to the printed page, you see. And, as we've covered, no other use, patenting, sale or further claims were made about any technology or process or any other use on any other font... ever.

“So you could call it the "spiritual limit" of the process…”

But the truth is that the limit was a real value to be minded in the design process, followed through whatever planned stages were involved in production to achieve the proper result in a product that still needed great care to use.

"...he was good at "espionage"

lol... loaded with a published article and a magnifying glass, he decided which founder to work with? This guy would be the master spy of the world with the web and zoom at his fingertips.

Té, every good idea is preceded by 10 stupid ideas. :-)

The claims that were made about this font, were not made about those fonts.

Good point.

However your "proving themselves" speculation remains quite incongruous, at least when it comes to doing so on a national level; what does make sense is that Olive wanted to market its superiority to D&P (so on a local level, which does not jive with what you opined).

the limit was a real value to be minded in the design process

Sure, on a theoretical level. On a "spiritual" (hence eventually practical) level, once the pantograph is saving you effort, it quickly starts seeming inefficient to combat what the pantograph "wants". This is something the Bentons quickly discovered: as much as they tried to educate the customers of their systems that having a large number of masters (each for a narrow size range) was important for quality, their customers preferred to save as much time/money as possible; after all, readers weren't complaining... Eventually even ATF itself gave in to that.

loaded with a published article and a magnifying glass, he decided which founder to work with?

?
That was about Banco. And he was already an Olive employee (in fact one with a controlling interest). Plus AFAIK he never worked with any other foundry (except for his -aborted- final effort).

My point was that Excoffon was not a hermetic, insular designer; in fact he was highly active on all fronts of French type and graphic design. So John's "How did he know?" seems to have a highly probable answer: he was paying attention. This BTW is something Rault's book does better than the one by Chamaret/Gineste/Morlighem (which is however a fabulous effort): it conveys superbly what made Excoffon tick (allowing one to make better speculations).

BTW it seems that your goal has become to aggressively doubt every single thing I say. OK, let's try this one: Font Bureau makes some great newspaper fonts.

hhp

Another detailed picture to tribute to the pantograph question. I don't think the Calypso was a big problem compared to the Haas Gutenberglied and even to the Sabon 10 pt 'g'. Again with the half mm Mackie M typometer below.
I flipped the image so it can be read by non-metal typesetters ;-)

Great image, Joep!

It seems to me unlikely because of the issue of depth, but I was considering etching of patterns or matrices, and perhaps you are thinking of punch production?

Wouldn't a punch need to be still higher relief than a matrix? Or do I misunderstand what you mean by "the issue of depth"?

A punch needs to be high relief, but the part that needs to be cleanest and sharpest is at the surface, rather than in the recessed area.

Ah, I get it, thanks.

Meaning the Face needs to be clean?

"I flipped the image so it can be read by non-metal typesetters ;-)"

May I flip it back? This thread is giving me type vertigo. (-;

bbg, here it is flipped back. In the 100% photographs I saw something strange. In the detail from the Calypso you see in the middle a strange deformation between some dots. I think that this is a casting problem? As comparison I placed a detail of the Gutenberglied below.

Here on the right the metal type that Tetterode made in 1951 (on the left the one from Haas). Henk Gianotten kindly send it to me with an explanation. It measures 10 pt with the Lords Prayer. The dutch version has 380 characters. So it is smaller and has more characters than the one from Haas. Tetterode made 13 metal types for the smallest book in the world (in 1951) that contained 6 intro pages and the Lords Prayer in 7 languages. The page size was 5 x 5.3 mm. The engraving was done during the night because Tram line 3 in Amsterdam caused trembling during the day that could influence the engraving by the pantograph. The book and metal type is still available at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz. Many thanks to Henk for sending me the metal type and the nice story that came with it.

If they had to do it in NYC with all night subway, it would have been a bit shaky ;-)

Loving this thread. The technology under discussion predates what I started with -- chemical plates (but we ordered those from Tetterode as well) --, except that I also used rub-off Letrasets to create CRC with.

To make it complete here the Letraset version compared to the Advert in Caractère Noël like before. On the right the Letraset version. Above left a couple of dots are gone and the white holes in the black parts are getting pretty round as well. I thought the Letraset sheets were printed with silkscreen but I am not sure about that because I do not see the typical screen outlines. Maybe someone knows?

Letraset sheets were printed using silkscreens, but the silkscreens were of course produced from films. The production method may have gone through several stages, but at a certain stage, the films were produced from red masking films (such as Rubylith by Ulano) which were either cut by hand or by a plotting machine. I recall a small booklet which describes that production process, also colleagues reported this after having visited Letraset in England. Around 1983, Letraset switched from cutting by hand to Ikarus, which meant that the artwork was digitized and corrected and then output on the aforementioned plotter, typically an Aristo flat-bed plotter. Of course the film cutters tried to compete with the machine output for some time … In the case of Calypso I think that the film cutting part has been left out. I think the characters were printed on baryte paper, then photographically enlarged, retouched and then again films were used to create the master film from which the films for the sheets were produced. Anyway, there is no reason why a former Letraset typeface should show screen outlines.

This is the most entertaining Typophile post I have read in recent times. I'll try to do something on a T shirt with Calypso for an artsy client dealing with frogs and post it back once it's printed.

Off-topic, but related to the Letraset to Digital transition: http://typophile.com/node/91696

Albert Jan, What I mean is that a line in silkscreen has always a jagged edge (I hope this is good English!). I don't see that jagged edge on the Letraset sheet. On the pictures the most recent limited edition Slanted (Cuba) packed in a wooden cigar box with photocards and some silkscreened cards. The one I enlarged is situated at the top (the wing of the bird). You can see in the enlarged part almost which screen is used to print. I do not say that you are wrong but I am curious which screen Letraset used. After all the original film that is used to expose the light-sensitive layer can be as sharp as a knife but always the screen will be visible because it stays as the carrier of the exposed layer. Or do I make a wrong assumption? -Joep

It is a common misunderstanding that silkscreen is a coarse repro-technique. I have seen full colour printing in 200 lines/cm done in silkscreen… (Done in the eighties in Germany, I think.)

Real quick: Joep, that sawtooth pattern you're seeing is called "half-bitting" and it's used for anti-aliasing; you can see it quite clearly towards the top (closer-to-rectilinear) part of the curve. So it's a feature, not a bug. :-)

I'm still trying to make time to catch up to all the cool new stuff in this thread!

hhp

Mmm, Hrant, I have done some silkscreening (not at 200 dpi, Bert ...) but are we talking about the same technique? You know, pushing ink through a woven mesh? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_printing

By the way, I just saw the movie Seven Psychopaths. With Woody Harrelson, Christopher Walken, Tom Waits, Sam Rockwell, Colin Farrel and so on. Weird and beautiful. The director who made it also directed In Bruges. Some compare him with Tarantino but I think he lives somewhere between Quentin T. and the Coen Brothers. Go see it!! -Joep

(I sometimes have to take some time of ...)

So silk-screening naturally produces half-bitting? Wow.

But I assume you're saying that you're not seeing that in the Letraset sheet. I guess at some point in the process that Albert Jan nicely described, blurriness ends up hiding it?

BTW Bert said 200 per cm...

hhp

For many years, the Swiss have made very high quality silkscreen posters. I have seen close up the originals from posters by Armin Hofmann, Müeller-Brockmann, Peter Megert, and others. The work was very precise, clean and perfectly registered. I don't know if today, the craft is still at the level hat it was in the 1960s. The examples I saw were from the 50s and 60s. They were quite good!

Were there gradient Ben Day (or equivalent) screens—in film or paper—available at the time? If so, they would have been a useful design tool for Calypso.

Nice use of the name Belafonte—Harry Belafonte’s Calypso (1956) was the first million-selling LP.

but always the screen will be visible because it stays as the carrier of the exposed layer. Or do I make a wrong assumption?

Joep — I should think that, in general, the degree to which evidence of the screen might remain would have a lot to do with the viscosity of the ink and the absorption of the paper/substrate.

In the case of Letraset sheets, this was certainly no ordinary ink (and probably plasticized). It needed to cover relatively thickly and remain somewhat flexible, and it was not absorbed into the substrate, obviously (otherwise, how would it transfer?).

I can imagine — and this is pure speculation — that with enough viscosity, any effect from the screen could have disappeared as a result of surface tension after the screen was removed.

Whereas, in an example like the postcard you showed, with thin ink and absorbent paper, edge effects from the interaction of the screen with the mask are more likely to remain evident as the ink sets almost as soon as applied.

Super page Nick! It lets me remember the letraset and Mecanorma sheets with screen dots you could cut out with a knife.

Kent – so you think that the material they printed was like an oil stain that formed from itself a fluent edge. It is of course an explanation that the jagged edge is gone that is normal with silkscreen printing. I thought that there was a possiblity that it could be done with offset and a special ink but Albert Jan Pool said earlier that Letraset was silkscreen printed. He mentioned also that it probably was printed first with lead type (or maybe phototype?), in the case of Calypso at a maximum size of 36 pt and then enlarged with the repro-camera to 72 pt. That is why it isn't as sharp anymore because the original was printed type. I thought that they would work from the original artwork (or a copyproof of it) and had it reduced to 72 pt with the repro-camera.

In 1971 Monty Python's Big Red Book was published. I have one of 29,999 books! They also made use of the enlarged dot screen in 'found', cut, glued and hand coloured collages. Not as big dots as Nick's example but it shows that the dot screen had followers for a long time.

Letraset was silkscreen printed.

I think that has been the case. Concerning Letraset, this is what I heard through other people. In the mid-eighties, an older silk screen printer in The Hague showed me some of his old stock of larger ‘wet-transfer’ letters that had been produced through silk screen printing. He also told me that it would be rather easy to produce such letters oneself. As far as I remember, the letters did not show rough edges. He told me that this kind of transfer letters had disappeared from the market because of the dry-transfer system and the headline phototypesetting systems. The advantage of the headline machines is that they could produce headlines in almost any typeface and size needed, whereas wet-transfer letters were only available in a limited range of designs and sizes.

Dry transfer sheets, produced by silkscreen, was how we made slick mock-ups or “comps” in the 1970s and 1980s.

In fact, silkscreening a spot color onto transfer sheet, and rubbing it down onto a sheet of spot colored pantone paper, produced a crisper image than subsequent 133-line CMYK printing with its attendant registration problems.

As a designer, I didn’t do the silkscreening, but bought the service from the same supply house that also made PMTs, line screen conversions, etc.

size of 36 pt

That might explain the differing patterns in your comparison (first post of the 16th) against the 60 pt Noël sample.

Concerning the softening of the edges of Letraset silkscreening, I guess looking at sharp "inside" (white) corners might reveal the effects of fluidity... unless they used trapping. :-)

BTW Nick, that Wright/Lichstenstein connection is golden!

hhp

Karlgeorg Hoefer (father of Linotype's Otmar Hoefer) was one of the lead type designers in Germany. Like Excoffon he was very much interested in handwritten type. A typeface that he made in 1965, called Zebra, could be influenced by Calypso. It has the same boldness and the gray parts are not translated to dots like Calypso, but are drawn as thin lines. Typical is also that Linotype did not make a digital font of it, maybe just as with Calypso for commercial reasons. So also there is a similarity. In 2007 P22 made a digital typeface based on the original drawings. A statement you can find on the site of P22: “Hoefer was, and remains, the king of brush lettering in Germany. Nobody even came close”, seems also to point at being the German counterpart of Excoffon.
Check out the site of P22 (http://www.p22.com/terminal/hoefer.html) and the site Otmar Hoefer made for his father's work (http://www.kghoefer.de/English/KgHoefer_Typefaces.html). -Joep

Hrant asked what the resolution was of the pantographs Tetterode used to create 'The Lords Prayer."
The answer is: "I don't know."
I started at the Lettergieterij Amsterdam in 1963. At that time the management saw that letterpress would be replaced by offset and hot metal typsetting and manual typesetting by photocomposition. In 1963 LA sold Morisawa and Intertype fotosetters. The importance of the type production was decreasing and the transfer from the old artwork to photocomp artwork just started. Later on LA/Tetterode produced artwork for a.o. AM, Berthold, Film-Klischee, IBM, Intertype, Linotype, Compugraphic, Bobst, Letraset, Mecanorma and the ATF-Hadego Photocomp System. The ATF-Hadego artwork was prepared by ATF, Tetterode and Hadego.
Most of the manuals, most of the artwork and all the Tetterode typface specimen books are now part of the Tetterode Collection. That is part of the "Bijzondere Collecties" of the UVA University of Amsterdam.
See www.bijzonderecollecties.uva.nl
It's in the same building where Warren Lee has his famous book store!
I will try to find an answer on your question.

Much appreciated.

hhp

Great post.

Here a picture from Interrobang Letterpress with a 24 pt Zebra mounted on the press and printed on a sheet. In the second picture an enlargement of this print where you can see that the gray area is made of thin lines.
The metal type of Zebra can still be ordered from original matrices from Rainer Gerstenberg (former D Stempel GmbH). http://www.rainer-gerstenberg.de/

Can’t resist posting “Phantom” of 1836:

Thanks Nick! In 1836 there was no Benton Pantograph. So cutting punches by hand with lines and equal white spacing between them was not easy ...

Not so difficult: a thin file could be used to cut the lines, which explains their regularity.

Engraving burin that produces parallel lines:
http://www.eclyons.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=5&products...
Such could have been applied to relatively soft, blank working metal, then the counters etc., removed, and sterotypes made. This method, of putting the lines down first, would have made it easy to ensure that all the serifs were the same number of lines, and the overshoots were integral. Does that make sense?

Type rasterization, 1836 style.

Nick: "...putting the lines down first, would have made it easy to ensure that all the serifs were the same number of lines,..."

Imagining they were sick of hand work by then, and with the semi-industrial revolution on them, I think they would do anything to "mechanize". I'm pretty sure they knew the dimensions of everything before they started cutting — so, my guess would be they cut the letters on the punch first, or locked up type in a chase A-Z, e.g, and then repeatedly rolled or dragged a jig bearing 19 incisor points along the chase, incising the whole set of punches as the jig above moved along the line. A screw or two could control the depth of the cut, they could proof in place, change incisor depth, type and width, rotate 45 degrees, have a ball, show the boss later when he was in the mood to find out you modified some of his stuff, a little.

Nick, very nice site with the burins and other tools to make line shadings. But do you think you could cut as deep as needed for a punch?
That it was not always done with such craftsmenship one can see in the 1827 specimen from Laurent et De Berny (At that time owned by Honoré Balzac). The lines and white spaces are very irregular. Although I think that this was wood type and not metal type. In the specimen this is not mentioned specifically.

Or maybe it was done by using a more inventive approach. When you take lines and stack them you can easy cut out a letter. See the illustration where I layered two characters of the Figgins type on top of a line specimen from 1827 by Laurent et De Berny. Of course you have to define the right thickness of lines and white between them.

There was some discussion on the sharpness and resolution of silkscreen printed characters on Letraset sheets. The ATF/Hadego Photocompositor has white - silkscreen printed - type on black plastic mats. They are 20 or 48 points and can be enlarged up to 72 point. I will prepare some additional info and illustrations on that subject.

Thanks Henk. I only had seen untill now the Diatype discs from Berthold. I did not know that this type of photocomposition also was used. I image that dust was a big problem?

In 1910 Berthold bought their first engraving pantograph (Stempelbohrmaschine). As they describe in their publication 'Das Haus Berthold' (The Berthold Company) from 1921, although the Americans had began using it already before 1900, the engraving machine was rejected by the punchcutters of Berthold as inferior to handcutting. After introducing the engraving machine at first only simple typefaces were done on the machine untill it was proven to be good enough to ensure the quality of Berthold metal type.

A little bit of dust was a great problem in the beginning. Later on high-sensitive line films came available and the contrast was high enough to get a dark positive headline on film. It was combined with the text and contacted on another film.

Henk – It differs from Diatype that it is only made for headings and titles, I think. When you place the black blocks on each other your line spacing will be huge. So I think you have to compose each line apart and by hand?

I think this line font with shading was for the engraving pantograph even more difficult than Calypso ...
Dazzle, a Device font from Rian Hughes.

I just stumbled over a recently designed dot screen font from John Bomparte. It is called Subliminal BF.
Very readable in smaller sizes: http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/bomparte/subliminal/

He mentioned also that it probably was printed first with lead type (or maybe phototype?),

Please do not mix up design and production methods for artwork with the production methods for the Letraset dry transfer sheets. I did not mean to say that the sheets themselves have ever been produced from metal type. In some cases, the artwork for the typefaces was based on baryte prints from metal type. This method was not exclusive to Letraset though, the artwork for many typefaces from the photocomposition era was based on baryte prints, which were photographically enlarged and then retouched. Scangraphic has done some typefaces that way and late Bernd Möllenstadt, the former type director of Berthold, told me a few months ago that the Berthold type studio also has been using this method. They even had to work this way for typefaces from their own library because in WWII the Berthold type foundry had been bombed and many (if not all) matrices had been destroyed. At the beginning of phototypesetting, the only access they had to many of their own typefaces was through printing offices that had Berthold typefaces in their type cases.
Concerning phototype setting in the process from artwork to the sheets: I recall someone telling a story that (at least for some years) phototypesetting was used for the production of the films from which the screens for the sheets were produced. After the artwork for a typeface was completed, a 2,5 Inch film font was produced from the artwork with the use of a ‘step-and-repeat’ camera. The 2,5 Inch font was then used to manually phototypeset the artwork for the films (with a machine like the Berthold Staromat or a Dr. Böger Copytype) for the various screens. They had to produce about as much films/sheets as there were sizes to be made available. The production of the 2,5 Inch font was an extra production step, but ‘typesetting’ the artwork (line-by-line) was faster than accurately mounting all letters individually.

Albert Jan – Thanks for clearing up some things and writing this story. In my book I mention that Berthold had damage but I did not know that original matrices were destroyed during WWII (just as was the case at Klingspor foundry). So a lot of original material was lost during that war ... – Joep

I got that story from Günther Gerhard Lange and from Erik Spiekermann (who probably got it from Lange). They talked about the ‘Matrizenlager’ (matrice warehouse) being molten down in the bomb-fire. We have to consider though that for a producing foundry the matrices are the most important part when it comes to being able to keep the business alive, so that is probably also the main part of the story that is being told. For designers, it might be more interesting to (also) look at things such as punches, sample letters (for the spacing), artwork, pattern drawings and settings for the engraving machine. I do not know what exactly got burned and/or molten down, but the damage must have been severe.

Yes, that was the disadvantage of the Hadego system. You had to expose line by line. Like the Ludlow. However, in those days most users made their text on Linotype and Intertype machines and the headlines on their ATF-Hadego. In 1960 a Hadego Ultra was introduced with a more acurate filmfeeding systems and more 'kerned' characters to improve the typographic quality.

Couldn't resist to buy the smallest book (in 1951) from Tetterode at the Gutenberg-Museum shop in Germany. These pictures belong to the 10 pt letter that I showed before.

NEW FREE DOWNLOAD

After comment from John Hudson we reworked the design of Calypso the last couple of weeks. So we removed anchor points, cleaned paths and we looked at every character and reworked it again by looking at material we received recently.

Because the generated .ttf fonts still showed a lot of deformation we decided to make a PostScript (.otf) font –that gave better results and less deformation– with a base drawing of 1000 pt and we generated a TrueType (.ttf) font at a base drawing of 2048 pt (em-square). The otf is 179 KB and the ttf is 322 kb so for larger text amounts and headings that are less than 100 pt the .otf should be good enough. For large display purposes the .ttf font should be better.

The download of the TrueType font has the same name as the previous font so you should replace it before using.

Below in the picture on the left the first design and deformation caused by generating the first TrueType font. Our original drawings had perfect round dots. On the right the reworked TrueType font based on a 2048 pt drawing in the font software. The detail is the above left part of the 'T'.

I found interesting information about Calypso at Skyline Type Foundry that seems to have matrices from Dimension, a copy of Calypso. According to him it are rip offs that were probably made in Japan for Chas Broad's Typefounders of Phoenix. He further writes: 'Interestingly, they are all stamped with the name “Calypso” except the 48pt, which is stamped “Dimension”. We cast and offered the 24pt in March of this year, and it was a colossal dud!' (It is not strange that the 48 pt is not stamped Calypso because the biggest size from the orignal Calypso was 36 pt –Joep)
Before they were bought by Sky they were bought by Los Angeles Type Founders (LATF) from Typefounders of Phoenix. Below page 4 of the 'Antique Types' (not dated) specimen by LATF. Interesting is also that they offer also figures that were not included in the original Calypso. I asked today Rainer Gerstenberg who has the original Calypso matrices but he writes that there are no figures available from Calypso. Were they made in Japan?

It is funny that as you can see the D, N, B and C are upside down. How that could happen I don't know because you can't do it like on the computer. Maybe they were delivered to the (Japanese) engraver on film and that he took the wrong side of the film copying them?

Finding the 'Dimension' from Type Founders of Phoenix gave some new insights as you can see below. Profonts Calypso seems to be a copy of the Phoenix version but the mirrored characters were noted except one ...
See also: http://www.linotype.com/653967/CalypsoStdRegular-product.html

Still researching I found more ...
In the 55th Anniversary Edition of the standardwork Encyclopedia of Typefaces from Jaspert, Berry and Johnson the Calypso also is present on page 258. This is a reprint of the last revised fourth edition of 1970. In this picture also some strange things happened. In the first row the K is forgotten but the B, C, D and N are correctly printed. However, on the second row something strange happens with the G and H!

Nice investigations!

hhp

Does the world need you?

Today we make our Calypso complete with ornaments (in French ornements). These ornements where also presented in the 1958 specimen of Calypso. On the fourth page (back page) a number of ornaments where printed. I have never seen them on the market or know of special made matrices. It can be presumed that they where made by turning the metal letters. It would have taken some work to position them in metal type. So now we made a font of the characters presented on this first specimen. We made it easier to type them because we have positioned the characters in the middle of the cap height in the ornement weight of the font.
The TrueType ornement font (also based on 2048 pt design) is now included in the download. An example of the characters is also included as PDF. The typing is easy: the counterclockwise rotated character is placed under the uppercase key and the clockwise rotated one under the lowercase key. Some characters like K and A are placed normally and under the uppercase key they are rotated 180°. The second L (that is normal) is placed under the bracket key and the rotated version you can find under the other bracket key.
Have fun!

hrant, we had before a discussion about the accuracy of a pantograph engraving. I just read 'Das Schriftgießen' (Letterfounding) from Walter Wilkes published by Technische Hochschule Darmstadt in 1990 (a wonderful book!)
According to Wilkes the accuracy of the Benton Pantograph is 0.005 millimeter. –Joep Pohlen

That's about 0.2 mil, which is much lower than any number I'd heard... At that resolution you probably didn't need to touch up tight corners manually (something we know took place, at least among foundries who cared) since ink bleed was more than that amount. Maybe that number is referring to the mechanics, without factoring in the thickness of the cutter? I'm pretty sure the cutter was the "resolution bottleneck" since it was prone to breakage (plus the smaller cutter you use the longer the work takes).

hhp

I think that you must separate two things. Accuracy is something else than making the smallest detail. As you can see below (in the drawing) you can work with different tools. One tool on the left to make the large flat parts. That tool can be large as well and flat at the bottom with a large diameter. The other tool has a sharp point and gets thicker to the top to make it a stable working tool without to much vibration and with enough cutting capacity. With this tool you get a bigger radius when you go further into the material. You see on the small engraved metal letters from Tetterode with a whole text on a 10 pt letter that they are not deep engraved to reach this detail. When you engrave deeper as done on the second picture below you have to sharpen the corners manually as you can see in this picture where a machine engraving gets the finishing touch.

Nice explanation.

hhp

A picture shows more than 1000 words. Here some examples of engravers cutters. You can see in the table on the right that the tip diameter can be extremely small (0.001 inches). Depending on the diameter of the shaft it can quickly get bigger. So I guess that for removing the biggest shunks they used a big cutter and for the detailed work where you had to remove less material a cutter with a small shaft. I think that the fact that you had to rework the punch or matrix was for a lot of German typefounders the reason why they began to use the pantograph engraver much later than in America. In America around 1893 and for instance Berthold began to use it in 1910. They had the idea that the letter got a mechanical look and you still had to finetune it after engraving. It was more the idea of craftsmanship that played a big role. It is the same as in around 1986 when typesetters and graphic designers had the idea that typesetting on the mac was not as good as the other (also digital) forms that where used on the Linotronic, Scangraphic etc. More a mindset than that it was reality.

To show the difference between hand engraving and machine engraving I made two pictures. The first is a picture from the book 'Souvenirs brouillés du Palais typographique' with photographs from Olivier Doual from the material of the l'Imprimerie Nationale in France, published by Des Cendres. You can see that the counter of the letter on this punch almost looks like it is shoveled out. And it is ...

Because we were still thinking that with a bigger original we could still enhance our Calypso we ordered a 36 pt fresh casted alphabet with apostroph, dash and point. And as we thought there were details we did not see before in the 24 pt version. So if you like you can download version 3 of the Calypso PF and Calypso PF Ornements.
http://www.letterfountain.com/extras_e.html
In the image you can see the 36 pt 'D' from the Olive Calypso.

Amazing.

Am I the only increasingly getting a machine-made vibe from all this?
What are the chances Olive had a computer? Pretty close to nil I presume.

hhp

Hrant– What I learned during this process was that mechanical is better than on a computer! Of course you can draw perfect dots in Illustrator (or Freehand) but in font software your grid only has 1000 pt in the normal situation. So the software forces anchorpoints on the available grid and almost no dot is round anymore. That is why I had to choose the 2048 pt grid that would create a much to heavy font for use in large text books for example. You maybe can't get it out of your printer or at least a lot slower. For a font like Calypso that is used only for headlines this should be not a big problem. However, also in this large version, when you would blow up the letter you will see deformation because it still forces the anchorpoints to the 2048 pt grid. With a normal typeface that has almost never perfect circles this is not a big problem but you will always have some lines slightly of your initial drawing.
So what is the nice conclusion of this, just because you have no restriction with a grid: MECHANICAL IS BETTER

Joep,
Sticking points to the grid is a FontLab limitation.
But not a limitation of the font format (otf/ttf).
Both Glyphs and RoboFont supports decimals coordinates.
http://typedrawers.com/discussion/comment/2109/#Comment_2109

Pablo, I will study that solution you suggest. I see in the link that there is a lot of discussion about whether or not you can work around the grid. I will download a trial of the 1.4 version!
However, I found it a relieving thought that sometimes things were not so bad in the metal age. It was a lot of work composing even a single page but sometimes in the fast an even faster layout and print culture of today (when you want even alltogether in a single day) you maybe can believe that people with or without an burnout begin to look back to the time everything had to be checked three or four times before getting it on paper because it had to be perfect. Maybe in the time of 'slow food' we will get also 'slow printing'.

Joep, don't confuse mechanical and digital; a computer can still control a pantograph.

Also, when digital is of sufficient resolution the advantages trump the disadvantages; see digital cameras for example (which were lousy at first).

Pablo: You don't need to move away from FontLab - you can just use a higher Em. And I personally don't trust fractional coordinates - they often set up an illusion that ends up biting you.

hhp

Yes of course Hrant. All over the planet metalworkers prove what you are saying. Our aluminium cases of our Imacs, Macbooks and Ipads are made with computers that control CNC machinery on a high level of accuracy.

But with fonts we are not talking about a certain simplicity in construction that is mostly the case with metal work. I talk about the PostScript language that has to translate all information on a page in 1 and 0 digits to the printers were a limit is in memory and the deformation begins. I think that you also have had problems in the past when you made an Illustrator drawing with to many anchorpoints. When your printer has not enough memory to store the description of the PostScript file it will simply not print. I have had it several times and sometimes changing the printer brought some relief.
And that has always been the heel of Achilles (I hope in English it is a good statement) of computer generated pages. And that is why the grid in font software is restricted to a certain amount of points. So you get a distorted letter like in my case with the Calypso on a 1000 pt grid. Because the mechanical method has no grid restriction it can be exacter than the digital font. Of course other things like worn bearings or shaking of the hand that leads the pantograph can bring distortion but in theory it is is more precise.
Look again to my magnifications of the metal type and enjoy the detail ...

IIRC, the datatype used to represent coordinates in TTF is fixed 16.16, meaning that a 1,000-dot em would be a 65,536,000-subdot em. Erk.

To complete my story about Calypso I ordered a set 24 pt and 48 Pt Calypso/Dimension at Skyline type Foundry who took over the matrices of Typefounders of Phoenix as I wrote before. I thank Sky Shipley for his quick shipment and his efforts to find the 48 pt metal type he had and which was ‘old stock’ and was casted by Charles Broad when it was still Typefounders of Phoenix.
As you can see in the pictures below the 48 pt version of Dimension is actually the same as the Olive Calypso 36 pt, which was the biggest version Olive produced in metal type. The 24 pt version of Skyline is actually the 20 pt Olive version. So I prosume that the range 20, 24, 30 and 36 pt of Olive became 24, 30, 36 and 48 pt in the Dimension version. The 48 pt was not mentioned in the brochure I showed before.
It is not as strange as one can think. The Didot point used in Europe was 0,376 mm (0,0148 inch) and the Pica point used in the US was 0,351 mm (0,0138 inch). Not to confuse of course with the computer pica which is 1/72 of an inch. So the body of the metal type of 36 pt from Olive is 13,54 mm and the metal body of 36 pt in the US is 12,64 mm, So about 1 mm or 0,0394 inch less high. So the 36 pt does not fit on an American 36 pt metal body!
As you can see a part of the 48 pt metal body is not used. Also the Dimension ‘N’ is upside down. I placed it upside down to compare the form and dots better. As you can see the detail is a lot less than the one from the Calypso.
The second picture shows the ‘A’ which is not upside down (compare with the ‘N’). But here some creativity was used on the cross bar of the ‘A’ by engraving an extra line.

Here another picture taken from the side. I think that the copy is not made by electrotype but by etching from a (copyproof) film that is taken from printed matter. I think that that is why there is a lacking in detail and deformation. I think that you can see it also at the convex cone beneath a dot at the Dimension on the right. The Calypso on the left is much more the result of mechanical engraving I think. As i said before etching could also explain the flipping of some characters. What do you think?

Also as a completion of this thread an overview of three versions of Calypso that you can get at this moment (leaving out the Calypso Boy and the metal version from D. Stempel/Olive). The Skyline box sticker contains all characters of the Calypso/Dimension in metal type available. On this sticker I placed a red dot at the characters that are flipped. In the digital version of the Profonts Calypso only one character is still flipped as mentioned also before in this thread. Note also that Unger made an alternative version for the zero. In the Skyline version it is the same as the ‘O’. The 1 is a flipped ‘I’ both with Skyline and Profonts. The 4 had no eye in the metal version of Skyline and looked quite dark because of that. Unger made it a better match. Also the 6 in Ungers version is better in my opinion than the metal version of Charles Broad (Skyline). Although I think these additions are not matching in even grayness with the alphabet Excoffon created at Olive. I think you can see that clearly on the box sticker of Skyline.
The shown version of Unger is not complete and has more signs and diacritics than I have shown in the picture below. A complete character set can be seen on http://www.linotype.com/search/Calypso#6abad67f4cff65a7aa3a8f0bf4f162c6
In have no full printout of the metal version of Olive Calypso so I could not complete the pictures below with that.

Although I closed this thread for myself a week ago I today received a specimen that I could not resist to place on this forum. It is called Mr. Antique Volume 10, Ornate & Antique Type by Typefounders of Phoenix. I earlier showed a similar colored specimen by Los Angeles Type Founders that took over Calypso/Dimension matrices from Typefounders of Phoenix.

The type specimen shown here is probably from the early sixties. The information on page 2 says: 'These type faces are from the early 19th Century from the Old Type Foundries of ...' followed by a list of American type founders like Bruce, Barnhart, Dickinson etc. Olive is not mentioned in this list but beneath every specimen the former foundry is mentioned.
As you can see in the picture beneath the Dimension is written: 'A French Styling of the Late 19 Century'. As we know the Calypso was a new design by Excoffon from 1958 so it was only a couple of years on the market when Typefounders of Phoenix made a copy. Together with the mirrored characters and the typo in the first line I think it is a gem and real 'camp' of the sixties.

I mentioned earlier in my post http://typophile.com/node/103339 that I thought that Excoffon maybe got inspired by the 3D cartouches that were made in the nineteenth century. I have another clue that can support that. In Caractère Noël 60 the picture below can be found in the story about Excoffon. This cartouche did he make for an advertisement. The only thing that it is not dated and it could be made after he made the Calypso. But still the fact that he used a modern form of a cartouche in his type specimen of Calypso indicates that he had special interest for that art form.

Nice bit of analysis.

BTW what's a good definition of cartouche? I consider it a roughly cigar-shaped enclosure for some text, but maybe that's too tight.

hhp

The first time cartouches were seen were in Egypt. The oval frames in the top picture. They are architectural frames. But you can even see them on the Rosetta stone, of course cut out in the stone! The map with sheets that contain drawings of cartouches I showed before in this thread were inspirational drawings for architects. So it were 2D drawings that were really meant as 3D examples for cartouches like you can see in the picture on the bottom. In this example it is made from wood but mostly they were carved in stone. You can find them all over Europe but mostly in France and Italy. The interesting thing is that, as you say, you can also find them on cigar bands and more luxury goods were they have also a blind embossing and are in fact also a 3D representation.

The interesting thing however was that Excoffon turned it around. He made cartouches that looked like 3D but were meant as 2D. Just like he did with Calypso. In the picture below you see some more examples of how he was experimenting with that concept. But more to fool the eye than to make it too serious like the old cartouches we used on our postcards. It is a bit like M.C. Escher did. Do you really see what your brain tells you?

In fact, I read that the name cartouche comes from the Italian ‘cartoccio’ that means ‘rolled paper’. It was the form of rolled paper or leather that was carved in sand stone. It was used around a round window, as a frame for the founding year of a building and as a frame for text. During the years they became more extreme in form and appearance. Excoffon went with his cartouches and with his Calypso back to the early form of these cartouches, that of rolled paper.