Fraktur

Fraktur is a family of types, not a single face, and the family begins with a prayer book that Johann Schönsperger printed in Augsburg in 1513 for the Emperor Maximilian. Maximilian wanted a printed book that looked as if it had been written by hand. The model for those letters came from his secretary, Vinzenz Rockner. The same model served for Theuerdank in 1517, the long verse romance in which the emperor, thinly disguised, rides off to win his bride. If you have seen an early Fraktur at all, it was probably a page of Theuerdank.

Maximilian's other great printing job of those years was a monument on paper: the Triumphal Arch, a woodcut the size of a wall, designed in Nuremberg by Albrecht Dürer and his workshop and cut into the blocks by Hieronymus Andreae. That same Andreae, working from the hand of the Nuremberg writing master Johann Neudörffer, cut the next Fraktur a few years later. It is the type Dürer chose when he came to print his own books, starting with the Underweysung der Messung of 1525.

It spread fast. By the middle of the century it had pushed out Schwabacher and Textura as the ordinary book type wherever German was printed, and it travelled with German printers into Scandinavia, the Baltic provinces, Bohemia and Poland. As the rest of Europe gave up broken letters for roman from the late 1700s, the Germans kept theirs and kept improving it. Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf had found the Neudörffer-Andreae letter in his copy of Dürer's Underweysung and took it for the Fraktur as it ought to be. The Fraktur he cut in Leipzig around 1750 pared away the Baroque ornament and stayed the most used Fraktur in Germany into the twentieth century. Johann Friedrich Unger's narrow, light letter of 1793 was the Berlin exception, and the type of the early Romantics. The first edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Berlin, 1812, is set in a Fraktur of that generation. I cannot verify which cutting, but it carries Breitkopf's marks: the elephant's trunk on B, N, R, V and W, none on the A, the forked tops on b, h and l.

Germans argued about Fraktur versus roman for the whole of the nineteenth century. Jacob Grimm, for what it is worth, was on the roman side, and dropped the capitals on nouns while he was at it. The argument was settled in 1941, when the Nazi government banned Fraktur outright. It has not been a book type since.

The Fraktur in our case is Monotype's Altdeutsche Fraktur, Series 47, cut for the Monotype composing machine somewhere around 1910. Monotype in England withdrew it in the late 1960s, which in practice meant the matrices went for scrap. A set survived at Offizin Parnassia in Vättis, up in the Swiss mountains, where Hans-Ulrich Frey, one of the two owners, still casts from it. In his view and in mine, of all the Frakturs Parnassia can cast, the Altdeutsche comes closest to the Breitkopf of the 1812 edition. Our text size is 11 Didot, cast on a 12 Didot body. The Altdeutsche was not available above 13 Didot, so for the titles we added Monotype's Alte Fraktur, Series 98, at 24 and 36 Didot. All of it was cast sort by sort in 2025 and came here to be the basis for the press's Folk & Fairy Tales, a line that Little Snow-White opens in 2026–2027.

For this edition the English is set in it as well as the German. So the translation is read in the same letters the tale was first printed in, which means an English reader has to learn the long s and the ligatures, just as a German mother or father reading to their children did in 1812. I think that is fair.