Today I came across an incredible typeface: Gong designed by Johannes Wagner, released 1953. Here’s a link to a scan; it has to be seen big to appreciate it:
http://luc.devroye.org/gong.jpgGong has a fabulous chalk texture that looks fairly convincing in a first-generation print. I can’t figure out how they made this work as metal type. Did an autistic punchcutter actually engrave a chalk texture into punches? Did they have a machine that could engrave the pattern into the matrices the way the Bentons did with their shaded series?
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The Wagner foundry, of Leipzig, had been pretty much destroyed during World War II and reopened in another part of town after the war. (It eventually became part of the GDR state type foundry, Typoart.) I think Wagner himself managed to get to the West.
Gong was designed by Carlos Winkow, the creator of Reporter (1938)—surely the most free-spirited font of the Nazi era. (It foreshadows the beautiful Mistral.) Winkow lived in Spain for much of his career, though I don't know when he settled there. (He seems to have been a connoisseur of fascist regimes.) Reporter could have been cut as punches or mechanically engraved into matrices. There must be someone out there who has made a study of the Wagner foundry.
I'll make some inquiries.
There is a matching design, Jowa, without the texture. Could they have used photoengraving on cast Jowa and produced matrices with electrotyping?
mentioned in this thread:
http://www.typografie.info/3/topic/23770-font-der-nach-tafel-kreide-schrift-aussieht/page-2
1) Make a negative film of the solid untextured glyphs.
2) Create via ink spatters or similar an overall block of texture and make a negative film of that.
3) Sandwich the two and make a positive contact print.
4) Shoot the contact print out of focus to soften the edges of the spatters where they intersect the edge of the glyphs and make a new negative film.
5) Opaque out a few extra bits by hand and make a new positive contact print.
6) Photoengrave your block from it.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/kupfers/15990134165/
So, you see, type piracy is about 175 years old--not a new phenomenon of the digital era.
Off topic: is it just me or did the misuse of two hyphens for a dash got much more common recently. Why?
As to your off-topic remark: The use of double hyphens for an em dash is an old habit from typewriter days, when it was the only way an em dash could be represented. For a long time, em dashes typed into a Mac would come out incorrectly when read into Microsoft applications, so it was still necessary to use the double hyphens.