Albert-Jan Pool
“Stick to the point!”
What I appreciated about Lange is that he was above it all, in a way. Even someone like me, who worked for two of his competitors, who did not always fight fairly, was always a valued colleague for him. When I met him in the late 1980s, I was working at Scangraphic. The company was technically far ahead of Berthold, but our type library contained lots of poorly imitated fonts that were traded under false names, including some from Berthold. A similar situation later arose at URW. Like Linotype, Berthold also saw the exclusivity of its font library as a unique selling proposition with which it could secure and increase the sales of the typesetting systems they developed. GGL’s vision, however, was to sell the Berthold fonts as a stand-alone product and also to license them to competitors. At that time, the International Typeface Corporation (ITC) was a particularly shining example of the lucrative nature of the licensing business. Unfortunately, GGL was always overruled by the other decision-makers in the company. In retrospect, GGL was right: the typesetting systems of the time and their manufacturers have all disappeared from the market, but the typefaces have survived.
When I started researching the origin and history of the DIN typefaces in 2004, Kirsten Solveig Schneider re-established contact with GGL. I was curious to see how he would react to my interest in the said typefaces; after all, he had written the following in the famous book of specimen types Berthold Headlines E3: “The DIN typefaces which are also shown in this book make it horrifyingly clear what comes out when this craft is left to technologists and theoreticians.” Yet, he was willing to show me everything he had on file from around 1980. At that time, a DIN working committee had attempted to revise DIN 1451 medium and medium condensed, the public signage typefaces, which originated in the 1930s. GGL’s goal had been to improve the typeface on the basis of Akzidenz-Grotesk. However, the representatives of the Ministry of Transport favoured the version drawn by the lettering artist Adolf Gropp, which had been designed using lines and arcs.
The conversations were interesting — like in his famous lectures, he neither considered himself too good nor was too weary to express his admiration for Walbaum and Bodoni, his unwavering love for Fraktur (blackletter), and his unshakable belief in the legibility of Akzidenz-Grotesk, which, in his opinion, was the grandmother of all sans serifs. GGL did not just have belief, though; he was also highly skilled. He retained a subtle flair and a keen eye for typefaces well into old age. Like Weidemann, he knew that designing a typeface is like love. Too little and too weak are misguided here, as are too much and too strong. It is the art of sensitivity. The quarrels over the rights to the Berthold typefaces had noticeably weakened him in his final months. Yet his love for typefaces survived. Until the very end, he kept, maintained and supplemented his specialist library and his collection of type specimen books. Together with the type specimen collection of the former Berthold AG looked after by his colleague Bernd Möllenstädt, it constitutes a true treasure chest full of type specimen books. Today, it is located in the archives of the Technikmuseum (German Museum of Technology) in Berlin. Together with collections of other former employees of the Berthold company, it is available here for research. Whatever the next 100 years of typeface design and typography bring, we can count ourselves fortunate that GGL always encouraged us to stand on his shoulders. When parting ways, he always said in a friendly but firm matter: “Stick to the point!”
Link to GGLs quote on the DIN typefaces in Berthold Headlines E3 from 1982:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/stewf/11306891545
Albert-Jan Pool
Albert-Jan Pool during his lecture at the symposium “lesbar – Das Auge liest mit” (“readable – The eye reads along”), Vienna 2019.
Photo: Michi Bundscherer
