There are books that contain beautiful examples, such as John Dreyfus’s book on Van Krimpen, as well as material by Van Krimpen himself. You will probably have to go to a research library to get examples of the original letter press version.

The promised revival by Dutch Type Library has been going on for a long time, and they have an impressive PDF of it on their site, including some optical sizes. However, they don’t seem to have released it. I have no idea why.

In the original metal it was one of the most beautiful types ever. As has been commented on by an number of observers, the sloped roman was a failure in that it is rather bland and flat. The evaluation by Walter Tracy in “Letters of Credit” is fascinating, a must-read if you are interested in Van Krimpen’s work. The associated formal script type, Canceresca Bastarda, was also really beautiful.

I think that it would be much more usable if DTL would create a proper companion italic, based on structurally similar designs of Van Krimpen (such as the Haarlemmer, which they have already done).

I would suggest e-mailing DTL. Let us know what you find out.

Once in a while Frank Blokland comes on Typophile, so maybe he’ll comment.

thanx for the dutch library. i was on that site before and was discouraged by the language, but i found that pdf and it will be of great help. i don’t think i’ll be mailing them because my focus will be on the original thirties romulus type and it’s history.

i saw a couple of books by and on van krimpen, but sadly there are no libraries in my country that have books like that. i tried finding some chapters on the web (earlier i found some gerrit noordzij on the net) but no luck.

i found a neat van krimpen bio by years if someone’s interested: http://www.amethystvisions.com/portfolio/jvk_booklet_final.pdf

if anyone knows a recognizable logotype in romulus, that would be very useful too.