The digital font archive of Otmar Hoefer and Hans Reichardt on the website www.klingspor-museum.de
Otmar Hoefer writes here about how the Klingspor-Museum.de website with the digital font archive came about:
"The 10,000th PDF file depicting a type designer on www.klingspor-museum.de gives every reason to celebrate. I would therefore like to take a brief look back at the history of this website.
As a native of "Offebächer" and due to my father Karlgeorg Hoefer's profession - for many years a typeface teacher at the Hochschule für Gestaltung HfG and co-founder of the Klingspor type workshop in 1987 - I have grown up with typefaces and type samples since my childhood. My father often took me to the Klingspor Museum in Herrnstrasse on Sunday mornings or to exhibition openings. The director at the time, Hans Halbey, was a good friend of my parents.
My interest in this museum and its library remained aroused all the more permanently as there was always something new to discover from the world of writing and books. After leaving school, I decided to do an apprenticeship as a typesetter and my fellow apprentice Klaus Göbel was even more ambitious than me, as he was already collecting every type specimen published by the type foundries. I then studied for three years at the FH Druck in Stuttgart and in the last two years I worked as a student trainee during the summer vacations at the type foundry D. Stempel AG in Frankfurt am Main.
When I became a permanent employee at Stempel in 1978, I met my friend Hans Reichardt, who had completed his typesetting apprenticeship there. His field of interest is type artists, stamp cutters and type makers, which he collected in his own archive with many historical type catalogs at home. Part of his collection is now in the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz.
I was responsible for font marketing in the font production department and supervised various new font projects. One of the first was the "new Helvetica", which was launched on the market in 1983, supported by extensive marketing campaigns. A little later, the collaboration with Adobe on PostScript fonts resulted in our own production of Linotype fonts, for whose introduction I was also responsible as Linotype Library.
In 1985, under pressure from Linotype and its parent company Allied Chemical, D. Stempel AG had to be dissolved and font production was relocated to the main plant of the German Linotype GmbH in Eschborn.
When we at Linotype built the first store for fonts on the Internet in 1994, many people did not yet realize what impact this would have on e-commerce and public relations.
I have long been a member of the Friends of the Klingspor Museum, which is an association that supports the museum. In 1999 - during the annual members' meeting - the then director of the museum, Christian Scheffler, reported that they were working on creating a website for the museum; but there was never any clarification as to who and how this was to be realized. This led me to get involved myself. A small publication by Mr. Scheffler about the Klingspor Museum served me as an initial basis for the content of the website. I had some time and converted these texts into HTML pages. As I didn't have a website editor myself, I used simple HTLM commands to program the pages. That's where the simple structure came from, which was more about attracting visitors to the museum than telling them everything on the website.
One of the sections was that of the typeface artists, and at the beginning I only listed a few of them (e.g. Hermann Zapf and Adrian Frutiger).
When I presented this to Hans Reichardt, he came up with the idea of creating a separate file for each designer, which would contain the most important data about the designer and their fonts, possibly even with an image.
He had a Mac with PageMaker at home, so he could create the files and deliver them to me as PDFs, and I could then upload them to the website and link them accordingly.
That was in mid-2001 and every month Hans sent me either emails or CDs in the post with new PDF files. At the time, we had all imagined that the list would end at around 3,000 font designers. But things turned out differently.
Hans Reichardt retired, and to this day he continues to scour search engines and the Internet for the latest fonts and their designers, coming across even more unknown designers.
The index of font designers has thus grown by about 60 new entries every month, and because of the internationality of the designers, we also mention their nationality in the designer names - if known. Hans also maintains the existing designer data and constantly provides updates, which I upload to the server.
When Mr. Stefan Soltek became the new director of the museum, he was very positively surprised by the website and the resulting digital visitor traffic.
Suddenly there were requests from interested parties in the museum's library for further material on specific designers for whom there were no documents in the museum's analog archive. Mr. Reichardt was often able to help.
A few years ago, the city of Offenbach decided to advertise the museum as a subpage on the city's website. The current content is entered and updated there directly by the museum. Visitors who enter www.klingspor-museum.de now land on a homepage from which they can access either the city's official museum page or our digital archive of writings.
In the course of time, Mr. Reichardt has created a few other things on the subject of lead typefaces and type foundries as PDFs and delivered them to me, so that, for example, the information on almost 50 type foundries can be called up there.
He also converted the 1928 book "Chronik der Schriftgießereien" by Friedrich Bauer from Fraktur script into an Antiqua script that is easier to read today and expanded it to 148 pages with supplements. Further supplements have been published. The complete "Handbuch der Schriften" from 1926 (Albrecht Seemann Verlag), with its 178 pages, has been completely scanned and can also be accessed as a PDF with all supplements up to 1939. Mr. Reichardt has also completely digitized the three card index boxes of the Association of Type Foundries (VdS) and these scans are available for download on the klingspor-museum.de website. He donated the original boxes to the library of the Klingspor Museum in Offenbach am Main.
What started out as a small voluntary support project for the museum has developed over the last 19 years into a 4 GB data collection with 10,000 font designer names. We both do our work completely on a voluntary basis and bear all the costs ourselves. Everything is done manually with equipment that will soon belong in a museum. The "PageMaker" program that Hans Reichardt uses to create the files has not been around for a long time. It only runs on an old Apple computer with outdated operating software. But if it stops working, then that's it.
But we both enjoy the idea that with the help of search engines, wherever in the world, the information on the font designers can be found and read from the Klingspor Museum's font archive page."
Otmar Hoefer
Link to the digital font archive
Congratulations on the 10000th PDF and many thanks to Otmar Hoefer and Hans Reichardt for their voluntary work!
The team of the Klingspor Museum