4T ype & Charactersa favourable influence on exports within Europe. Typefoundry
Amsterdam could now sell types cast by Berthold, so these werenot cast in-house in Amsterdam. Nero (Berthold’s Lo Schrift),
Métro (Berthold’s City), Sirene (Berthold’s Signal), and probably Post-Antiqua as well, were brought on the market in thisway. De Roos adapted Berthold Grotesk as Nobel (1929), which
would grow to be one of Typefoundry Amsterdam’s best-sellingseries. That it was an adaptation of an existing design was notmentioned at the time of its introduction. Nobel had to answer
the demand for more severe sans-serif types that arose with theNew Typography. Among the Typefoundry Amsterdam designs
issued by Berthold were Oranien-Mediäval (Erasmus Mediæval)and Holländische Mediäval. In 1941, during the German occupation of the Netherlands, the cooperation between the two firms
came to an end.
From 1926, Dick Dooijes (1909–98) worked as De Roos›s assistant. His principal task was to make the working drawings.
In 1941, after De Roos left the foundry, he became designer anddraftsman, as well as taking charge of the typographic library.
The foundry had earlier approached Sem Hartz, then working
at Enschedé, about taking De Roos’s position, but nothing cameof it. Besides Dooijes, L.H.D. Smit (1917–86) was employed as a
type designer beginning in 1949. In 1945, G.W. Ovink (1912–84)
had joined the firm as aesthetic adviser. He had received a doctorate in 1938, writing his thesis on Legibility, atmosphere-value
and forms of printing types, and thereafter set up as an adviser
for typography and advertising printing. His principal task at thefoundry was to develop and supervise new type designs. In addition, he had joint responsibility for the typographic library, andhe contributed to the company’s public relations with publications
and lectures. This work occasionally interfered with his more
scholarly studies.
In addition to type designs by their own employees and thoseacquired from other foundries, Typefoundry Amsterdam commissioned type from freelance designers. The policy was very muchone of following existing trends. The foundry’s own types wereabove all to answer the needs demonstrated by the best-selling
foreign designs. Their 1951 commemorative book reports proudly about the foundry: ‘As far as current production capacity, it
can surely be bettered only by the American mammoth concern,
American Type Founders, Incorporated.’9 In 1962, Dooijes began
the development of his Lectura, intended as one of the foundry’s
general-purpose types – alongside Garamont and Columbia. Heand Ovink regularly consulted about the design. Market research
had indicated that the type had to be something in the Garamondgenre, but more economical with space and more regular. The
first (advance) specimen appeared in December 1968, and an extensive one entitled Lectura salutem in May 1969. The press release reports: ‘the fact that the typefoundry dared to take on
the investment required by such an extensive series of types as
the Lectura, is proof of their confidence in the vitality of metal
type for a long time to come.’ This quickly proved a poor assessment, however, for the metal-type era was on its last legs. In 1981,
Tetterode-Nederland (as it was now called) left its building complex in the Bilderdijkstraat and the Da Costakade. Parts of thelibrary’s interior were transferred to the Old Lutheran Church on
the Singel in Amsterdam, used by the University of Amsterdam.
9 G.W. Ovink, Honderd jaren lettergieterij in Amsterdam(Amsterdam 1951), p. 43.

T ype & Characters

After being occupied by squatters for a long time, the buildings
were converted into studio, office and living quarters. The firm,of which the typefoundry was now only a small and insignificant
part, occupied a new building in Amsterdam (Bos en Lommer).
Casting continued on a limited scale for a few years to serve small
printing offices and amateur presses. On 23 December 1988, however, the foundry was officially closed.

5A Date AT tetterodeDavid Bennewithv

On the way out to Tetterode’s current premises, located since2011, in the Parkwijk area of Almere, I made conscious use of 10
electric signs and 4 non-electric signs to get from A –> B. Theseelectric signs often make me think about the letter-objects journey
to dematerialisation. Which, I also think, essentially began with
the invention of electricity. Or, was it when Napolean requested
Captain Charles Barbier to come up with a code his army could
communicate with silently and at night?

30/08/’12 09:47

6T ype & Characters

T ype & Characters

7Moholy-Nagy’s utopian imagination of a unification between‘graphics and photography, so lettering and pictures would become one whole’. Letter production indeed made the move tooptics. Developed as industry modernised, in the search for more
efficient processes. Processes that would perpetuate themselves tobe in service of speed and quantity (which they were) … & mass
production … but on reflection also reveal themselves to a consolidation and hiding – into structures that would make it moredifficult to directly experience these printing letters.

In any case, it seems obvious to write, but it when a letter is dematerialised it is much more difficult to see what it really is. And now
I was travelling to a place that has been instrumental in their becoming so. The Lettergieterij Amsterdam v/h N. Tetterode, [L.A.]
built up by the merchant/entrepreneur Nicolaas Tetterode, started as a typefoundry and, shortly after, also began to handle

and supply printing presses. These printing presses would basically include set-lines of lead letters. These little objects, lettersor groups of words, could then be printed as an impression orperversion on paper. These lead-letter-objects would be visible
in the machine they were inserted. The letters were a part of themechanical engine. Activated, or set in motion, at the stage ofthe mechanical cycle they were required. The letters didn’t reallyaffect the other parts of the machine at all and at the end of their
job they were removed, recycled or melted. Like people working
in a factories production line they could do their job essentiallywithout interacting with the other parts of the machine, yet they
were essential to a result. This was the material of S. H. de Roos’
Hollandse Mediæval typeface, for example. Hollandse Mediævalwas a popular product in the L.A. catalogue; from its release in1912, up until post-WWII – when the company decided to nolonger market it. A reason for its removal describes a time when aplace [Europe] had to ‘reset’ and begin to rebuild. This particular
type of rebuilding would eschew the ‘arts and crafts’ associations
that de Roos’ letter evoked – assigning it a new situation, where
cultural connotation becomes essentially linked to calculation.
The demand in this period of time – at least as indicated by L.A.’s
promotional magazine Typografische mededeelingen – seemed tobe for ‘brisk’ typefaces. Already this adjective seems to be too
fast for heavy lead: “Get the lead out!” the phraseology predicts.
And this would eventually happen – in a different guise thanPhototypesetting machines were introduced to work with newoffset printing machines. Letters now were images on a photomatrix, a outline of a letter commanded in a computer-assisted
process, exposed with light to produce strips of composed type.
These strips output for paste-up... were still handle-able, visible
and at a 1:1 scale; but lighter, more malleable and rendered onto atransparent film surface. Getting them ready for film with wax andglue, you would still have to get your hands dirty...
There were still type-designers employed at the L.A. at the time,
but commissioned freelance designers (who usually worked on aroyalties system) or mergers with other type-image production
companies were being forged... The designers and their letter-designs were being out-sourced, as the graphic machinery became acore part of the business. With these new machines there seemed
to be a choice, or a predilection, presented within type-design:
Towards designing types for the new machines (that weren’tabout the machines), exploiting their capabilities and features asa starting point, or adapting the traditional letters, their carriedover histories and connotations, to new imaging processes. These
imaging processes that were simultaneously finding their way into
civilian objects – like surveillance and entertainment equipment.
Both approaches had advantages and drawbacks and both complicated a position, both requiring adaptation and compromise towork with the new machines. Paradox rules in the discipline ofdesign, I usually think its saving grace. These optics, capable ofprismatic and wild behaviours.

8T ype & Characters

This transition to digital information (a file), connected to a concatenate computer language, implemented in complex integration
and workflow systems perhaps turns the letter from a ‘tool’ intoa ‘device’, a contrivance and a convergence of typical functions.
Again, things disappeared, not to make things faster, but more
integral, knotted. Potentially infinitely reproducible, at least once
they are ‘activated’.

From the production – by no means the least amount – of 400,000
kg of lead letters in 1952 to less than 1,000 in 1988, the ‘lettergieter’ (the caster of lead letters) kept his job at Tetterode. Even
during the integration of the photosetting machines. But neither
process would endure the next stage of the letters development:
Digitisation. In the mid-80s, when letters went truly digital, disappearing from our hands and concentrating them to our fingertips, graphics companies dealt with them with varying degrees
of responsiveness. Tetterode’s then marketing manager, an advocate of this transition to digital, was connected for so long, heeven had a digital typeface named after him. The new and latent
programming language called PostScript, which no longer usedthe computer to command a photomatrix, but made the letters‘describable’ by the computer steered us into our desktop design
era. Letters that were once lead, then a negative – still realised
as a physical object – would now never again become worn (onlycorrupted). The typeface, here, is transformed into a system that
could now fit into many devices and facilitate (human) communication between them. They can even start to communicate withinthemselves. This allowing us to have a more circular, or reciprocal, relationship to the things we read and see and see and readand can use.