ff super grotesk: 15 of 20

An exchange between a colleague and me yesterday morning:

— I was at Barnes and Noble last night and I thought of you. I saw a kickass book on fonts.

— Oh really? Do you remember what it was called?

— Uh, it was big and blue and had “typography” in large, white letters on the side.

— Ah, yes. That book is called Typography, and it is kickass indeed.

And then I made a mental note: Please, Self, you really must reincorporate “kickass” into your vocabulary, for your use of it fell to the wayside right about the time you began to lose interest in Molly Hatchet, Def Leppard, and Loverboy, and your conversations these twenty years have no doubt suffered owing to the lack of it.

So last night, when I arrived home from work, I opened up that kickass, trilingual, ten-pounder, and the first figures on which I lay my eyes were captioned Drescher, 1936–39, Arabella; Drescher, 1956, Antiqua 505 Bold.

I attempted to decipher the text at the top of the page: no, no, German. To the left: Hmmm, French. At the bottom: Ah, there we are. I’ll get this damn book figured out yet! Then, I scanned the bio: Arno Drescher, 1882 to 1971 – I should live so long. Taught at yadda, yadda, et cetera. Fonts: Arabella and Antiqua 505, just like the examples. But wait – he’s the original Super Grotesk guy, and there’s no mention of it here. To the fontfont.com info panel I went.

Now I am, generally, a rather even-tempered person, but a nice, ol’ geometric sans-serif can make me rather giddy and not even a little insane. House Industries’ Catalog No. 31 – yeah, the Neutraface one – well, I slept next to it for a month. This unhealthy behavior had its precedent formed when the FontFont folks sent me a little brochure nearly four years ago. It featured, among a few other new faces, FF Super Grotesk by eBoy’s Svend Smital, and at the time, this font was an answer to my prayers.

I longed for a Futura with a little flair and flourish, and Smital’s resurrection of Super Grotesk provided exactly that. It boasts more than a smattering of standard and unusual upper- and lowercase ligatures; it contains a nicely drawn set of text numerals; and it includes a less geometric, alternate a and g. Here’s a sample.

Drescher’s association with Super Grotesk strengthened in 2001 when Bitstream released Drescher Grotesk BT, by Nicolai Gogoll. It lacks the bells and whistles of Smital’s design but is available in twice as many weights as well as a cut with an enlarged x-height.

With such splendid variants on the canonical form as FontShop’s and Bitstream’s interpretations of Drescher’s Super Grotesk, DTL’s and Font Bureau’s (recently expanded) cuts of Nobel, and now House Industries’ Neutraface, not to mention The Foundry’s digitized archetype itself, it is truly a – what’s the word – oh yes, a kickass time to be a geosans lover.

22-March 2003