What a lovely specimen.
Luftschiffhafen!

1. What date is the specimen?
2. Why long s?
3. Why the crossbar on Z?
4. I wonder what Ö and Ä look like.

Hi Nick,

Good questions. All I know is that the sample is dated sometime in 1927.
I added a few more samples in the first post as well.

/K

http://www.typophile.com/node/44950
http://typophile.com/node/7596#comment-51573

Kristian,
check out this DVD: Bleisatzschriften des 20. Jahrhunderts aus Deutschland [20th century metal type from Germany]. Dan Reynolds wrote an English review of this collection of scanned specimens, compiled by Hans Reichardt. Here is a table of content (PDF) – you will at least find Ehmcke Fraktur and Ehmcke Schwabacher in it.

Reichardt also created a list of all typefaces by Ehmcke for the Klingspor-Museum. Note that Ehmcke’s full forename reads Fritz Helmut (without ‘h’).

Nick,
why long s in Luftschiffhafen, or in general?
For the crossbar in ‘Z’: 1. This is common in handwriting models/script typefaces – and blackletter, and can also be found in several of these German transitional (i.e. from Fraktur to Antiqua) typefaces. 2. It helps texturing the otherwise abundant whitespace.

3. This is common in (Polish) handwriting as replacing Zdotabove (like in my name Żurawski :)
So, please, make Z without bar as alternative (for Polish lang) to not confuse Z and Zbar (for me they are different letters).

Printing Types of the World shows samples of Ehmcke Medieval, Medieval Italic and Medieval Bold, if that helps...

Thank you very much.

I will keep this entry uppaterad, when I come up with new discoveries.
The DVD seems to be good investment and I'll try not to neglect the Polish language ;-)

Sincerely,
Kristian