a long, passionate kis for you...

Part 1: Some context

Gentle reader, I must confess to you that in all honesty the entry – upon my first few readings at least – rubbed me entirely the wrong way. “Commerce knows no conscience...” he whined (1). Exactly who did this smug, self-righteous contrarian think he was, anyhow? After all, there was no font called Kis in my opus opusculorum.

In a feeble attempt at defending my ignorance, I should reveal that the year was 1999, and at that point in my study I knew next to nothing. Indeed, buying a second book on typography helped me in so many ways. Imagine! And so I embarked on my post-Bringhurstian journey; I started with Chapter 14, and I began to understand. To me, the tone was certainly more approachable and the story far more complete (2):

It is scarcely surprising, then, that when both the Mergenthaler Linotype Company and the Lanston Monotype machine Company announced their revivals of Janson in 1937, most American printers had no choice but to accept the historic information that was disseminated by these firms ... neither firm could offer many facts to accompany the first specimens of the recuttings ... both companies, it may be noted, perpetuated the erroneous impression that the types now named Janson had been designed by him ... as of 1939, however, Morison had become sufficiently curious about the true origin of the type and its designer to take the time to make a more thorough investigation than had heretofore been attempted ... Morison proposed that it was the Stempel foundry that had initiated the misconception by attributing to Anton Janson the types that it had acquired from the Drugulin foundry of Leipzig in 1919 ... the answer ... was finally supplied by Harry Carter and George Buday in England. Equipped with a photograph of a type-specimen sheet located in the National Library in Budapest (provided by Professor G.W. Ovink of Amsterdam), Carter discovered that the types shown here [a] were the same ones that had reached Leipzig and finally arrived at the Stempel foundry in Frankfurt. The designer of the so-called Janson types, it turned out, was a Hungarian punchcutter named Nicholas [Miklós] Kis (pronounced kish).

And so there, with Lawson, I really ought to have begun. He whet my appetite to be sure; I consulted his references and began to piece it together for myself, and some of what I learned on my Kis-quest follows...

Anyway, as Lawson stated, Carter and Buday built upon the work of others, and in doing so, they solved the conundrum. Writers and scholars who preceded them simply hadn’t made all the necessary connections; but nor were they sanguine about the font’s origin. Updike, for example, was uncertain (3):

Dutch types were also in vogue in Germany at the end of the seventeenth century, and were imported in large quantities. Some roman and italic Dutch types of this date were shown in connection with Breitkopf’s specimen in Gessner’s Buchdruckerkunst und Schriftgiesserey, Leipsic, 1740. These came from a Leipsic foundry which Fournier considered second only to Breitkopf’s – that of Hr. Ehrhardt. A head-line (omitted in our reproduction [b, c]) reads: “Real Dutch types, and a great number of other characters, which are to be found in the Erhardt foundry here.” These fonts resemble those given by Fell to the Oxford Press, and in cut belong to the seventeenth century. Their provenance I do not know.

And as Lawson pointed out, Morison too was curious, and it appears he nearly sleuthed his way to the answer. From a letter written by Morison to Van Krimpen, as quoted in Barker (4), and followed by Barker’s commentary:

A question about the Janson type. I think I told you that some German customers have been agitating the Monotype Corporation to cut all the sizes of roman and italic, and that we have agreed to cut them if we can get hold of the original material. I said this because I was under the impression that some of the sizes in Stempel’s list are modern re-cuttings, and by no means facsimiles ... Following up the matter, I discovered that Haag-Drugulin seems to have lent the original punches or matrices to Updike, and, for some reason or another, are unable to secure their return. Updike is a very tight-fisted little bantam, and I may have to get on to him, but, before doing so, I want to ask whether there is any foundation for the statement made to me that the successors of Anton Janson sold the material to Amsterdam about the year 1700; if so, whether any trace remains?

The consequence was that Morison was led to explore again the winding paths of late seventeenth-century typographic history that he had first set foot in twelve years earlier. He thought to borrow Francis Meynell’s fount of the Stempel Janson, and to make a start with that; but the Stempel cutting was too heavy, and he had not enough to go on. In May 1936, Morison dropped the idea and the punches so far cut were destroyed. But he did not stop work, and with the help of Gustav Mori he traced the types to the Ehrhardt foundry at Leipzig, c. 1710. There was no connection with Janson, whose name Stempel had given to the type, a mis-ascription followed by Morison in On Type Faces in 1923.

Truly, Morison did not stop. In two articles (5, 6) published in as many years in Signature, Morison first compared the Stempel types to those of Anton Janson and concluded that they could not have been produced by the same artist; he then proceeded to provide some details on, as well as a translated biography of, the Dutch typefounder Janson. Finally and perhaps most interestingly, although he did not yet know the origin of the Stempel types, he suggested that the misattribution be rectified – a suggestion that, 64 years hence, has gone mostly unheeded:

So little, indeed, is the sum of what was known of Janson at the time of the publication of the [first] article in Signature. In the latter portion of that article, it was demonstrated that the specimens of the romans and the italics that Janson sold had nothing, as regards their design, in common with the faces now sold by the Stempel Foundry and the American Linotype and Monotype Companies. Not one of the so-called ‘Janson’ types appears before 1691, i.e., four years after the artist’s death; none of them appears on a single specimen designed by him. Finally, the designs unquestionably engraved by him, as exhibited on signed and dated proofs, are, technically and calligraphically, very inferior to the Drugulin-Stempel series [d, e]. It cannot be believed that both series come from the same foundry; still less from the same artist. We may have that certainty, at least, about the design ... the Drugulin-Stempel designs, as I have pointed out in my previous article, are from the hand of an engraver whose endowment nearly ranks him with Garamond or Granjon. The attribution of the undoubted Janson material to one and the same hand can hardly be sustained, and now that the identity of Anton Janson is at last settled it would be well if the Stempel Foundry of Frankfurt, the Mergenthaler Linotype Company of Brooklyn, and the Lanston Monotype Machine Company of Philadelphia, reverted to some such general but authentic description as ‘Dutch Old Face’.

The Stempel types, then, form the pseudo-Jansonian bridge – albeit a necessarily narrow one when considering the scope of the work that Kis produced – spanning the 17th through the 20th centuries. Jack Stauffacher, in Janson: A Definitive Collection, traced some of the early history (7):

The exact origin of the Janson type is surrounded with much mystery & confusion, but we do, however, know that Anton Janson in 1674 at Leipzig brought out a specimen sheet exhibiting a roman in two sizes ... and another larger, more complete specimen in 1678. Janson was born in 1620 at Wauden in Vriesland, & at an early age was apprenticed in Amsterdam to a typefoundry. From there he went to Frankfurt in 1651, staying until 1656 when he moved to Leipzig, organizing his own foundry. He died there in 1687, a worthy tradesman but no great artist ... after his death, Johann Karl Edling purchased Janson’s foundry, and issued a specimen in 1689. From there his punches were sold to Wolfgang Dietrich Ehrhardt, and later superseded and finally discarded. In 1720 a specimen was brought out by Johann Christoph Ehrhardt of Leipzig, that clearly indicates a more refined and successful cutting than the earlier Janson specimens. The Ehrhardt specimen is titled, «Verzeichniss derer Holländischen Schrifften» (Real Dutch Types), which lends a very unique insight into the origins of the types used in Leipzig in the half century 1670–1720. It seems without doubt that the Ehrhardt specimen was cut from mixed sources. Of this material collected by Johann Ehrhardt certain matrices have survived to this day ... The printing firm of W. Druglin of Leipzig issued in 1868 a specimen of their types which shows the Old Dutch Face under the title «Renaissance - Holländisch.» In 1919 the firm sold the matrices to the David Stempel Foundry in Frankfurt, where they were erroneously renamed «Janson.» These are the types which, in the 12 point size, are before the reader [f]. They have since been copied for machine composition by the American linotype & monotype companies.

Fifty years ago, just as Stauffacher was publishing his beautiful monograph, Harry Carter was solving the mystery; together with George Buday, he published his findings first in Linotype Matrix and later in Gutenberg Jahrbuch [scans from this article here: g (note: caption should read “...in 1695.”), h]. Carter was a scholar of the first rank, and he was a gifted writer as well; the second article begins – and ends – in enviable prose (8):

The barrier of language has separated Misztótfalusi Kis Miklós from the western world; and it is a curious historical accident that the types that he cut are on one side of the barrier, and the memories of their author on the other. The Janson series of types, a range of Romans and Italics from 36-point to 6-point, now the property of the Schriftgiesserei D. Stempel, of Frankfurt a.M., are among the few surviving traces of this Hungarian from Transylvania in the part of Europe where he sojourned from 1680 until 1689 ... To the people of Hungary, who honour Kis as a patriot, a reformer of their grammar and spelling, as a writer and the most famous of their printers, it should be a satisfaction to know that his types still exist and to see them used for fine printing in western Europe and America. The versions of his design made for the Linotype and Monotype machines are a proof that his work is held in high regard by typographers. With the recognition of their author the Dacian Phoenix has risen once more from his ashes and belongs now to the whole of the civilized world.

Alas, the “author” has not been recognized nearly to the extent he should be. Perhaps, then, Bringhurst isn’t being so self-righteously antagonistic after all. Indeed, he is simply reinforcing what type historians before him either implied or explicitly stated: that the type be called what it is; in this case, Kis.

So what of the Kis types in the 20th – and 21st – centuries? How do the early Linotype and Monotype machine versions compare to their Stempel antecedent? And in turn, how faithful are today’s digital progeny – Linotype Janson Text, Monotype Janson, and Monotype Ehrhardt – to their metal forebears; and how do these digital interpretations of Kis’s types compare to each other?

Stay tuned: In a few days, Part 2, Some ontogeny and phylogeny; and Part 3, Some comparative anatomy.

1. Bringhurst, Robert. (2002) The Elements of Typographic Style, version 2.5, p. 223. Vancouver: Hartley & Marks.

2. Lawson, Alexander. (1990) Anatomy of a Typeface, Ch. 14, pp. 158–168. Jaffrey, NH: David R. Godine.

3. Updike, D. B. (1962) Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use, (Third Edition), v. 2, p. 44. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

4. Barker, Nicolas. (1972) Stanley Morison. p. 345. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

5. Morison, Stanley. (1939) Leipzig as a Centre of Typefounding. Signature, No. 11.

6. Morison, Stanley. (1940) Anton Janson Identified. Signature, No. 15.

7. Stauffacher, Jack. (1954) Janson: A Definitive Collection. San Francisco: The Greenwood Press.

8. Carter, Harry and George Buday. (1957) Nicolas Kis and the Janson Types. Gutenberg Jahrbuch.

01-Jun 2004