Fraktur Mon Amour, The blackletter book

The book’s design is exceptional: a massive black block from the outside, about 8 × 5 × 2 inch, more than 700 pages thick, with titles, edges and endpapers all colored in a loud pink! This “porn bible style”, as it was referred to, certainly is not to everyone’s taste. In an interview for Fontblog, Judith admits she herself was a bit shocked about her fetish book. “I was surprised how intense it turned out. Someone told me: ‘What you’re doing, that’s type sex’. He had a point.” Her chutzpah earned her a number of awards, including the TDC Award for Typographic Excellence.

The layout and the typography is more conventional: the accompanying texts are set very well in FF Profile. There’s an introduction with a brief history of the genre, some thoughts on its difficult image and its role today, plus a few descriptive words at the beginning of each chapter: Rotunda & Bastarda, Textura, Schwabacher, Fraktur, Decoratives & Initials, Modern, Contemporary, Display. All those texts are bilingual. The English translation was provided mainly by Jay Rutherford, a Canadian expat who is professor for typography at the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar.

With as many as 333 featured typefaces — 64 of them newly added — it was a good idea to attach a triple index: by typeface name, designer, and foundry. The range is wide. Fraktur Mon Amour has the classics like Wittenberger, Goudy Text, Rudolf Koch’s Wilhelm-Klingspor-Gotisch; along with more contemporary faces like Lucida Blackletter, Letterror’s FF Brokenscript or San Marco by Karlgeorg Hoefer; as well as fresh additions including Blaktur, Fakir, and Darka. Several fonts debut exclusively in Fraktur Mon Amour, or, like Tim Ahrens’ Herb, haven’t officially been released yet.

The “Modern” chapter contains a number of entries that I wouldn’t classify as strictly blackletter: Eckmann, Fanfare, Banco. However, I think the inclusion of those “greyletter” designs is reasonable: the boundaries are not that sharp, especially when it comes to written forms. Large parts of “Contemporary” and “Display” aren’t worth a long look; dozens of grungy free fonts and PoMo exercises in deconstruction that I am honestly not that interested in. Then again, some intriguing insights into unexplored terrain: blackletter pixel fonts and textura FontStructions — modular renderings of medieval forms, not dusty reactionary but rather cutting-edge hipness. Two ribbon page markers help navigating the tome.

Each typeface is presented on a double page. The recto shows the character set; upper- and lowercase alphabet, umlauts, alternates and ligatures (if present), a few special characters including punctuation, and figures. In some cases, there’s an accompanying style; a bolder weight, a swash variant, or even an oblique. That secondary style is not shown in full, only a handful exemplary glyphs are included. Below, there are three lines of continuous text set in a smaller size, with the wording carefully adjusted from page to page, in order to integrate each typeface’s special features, like ligatures or matching Lombardic caps. The point size always is stated: the character set is shown at a size of 30 to 40pt, while the text settings vary from 9 to 14 pt. All in all, the specimens are pretty useful.

The verso is the playground. It is filled with a kaleidoscopic pattern made from repeating letters of the respective font. While that may look nice, those pink-and-black arabesques don’t make much for me. After having looked at the first twenty or thirty of those ornamental textures, the typographer in me wished that space had been used for something less contemplative and more useful: background information that goes beyond the minimum data — designer, foundry and year of release — like a list of significant usages, or specifications regarding the language support. On the other hand, I can understand that this rather pictorial half of the book, together with the unconventional color, helped to address a wider — and different — audience. Introducing novices to the beauty of blackletter and tempting them to take a closer look is not the worst goal to strive for, I guess.

The appendix, in turn, is very informative. Friedrich Forssman, author of Detailtypografie, explains all the ſpecial rules that need to be considered when typesetting blackletter text. Also, a few books are listed that invite further reading.

The book comes with a CD, packed with 150 fonts — often “free for personal use, not to be used commercially”. A great deal stems from Petra Heidorn’s, Manfred Klein’s, and Dieter Steffmann’s large collections — digitizations both of well-known classics and obscure display gems, of mixed quality. That doesn’t mean they’re all trash. Most of them can’t compete with the commercial offerings of professional foundries, and I won’t recommend using these fonts for an elaborate blackletter project. Still, it’s nice to see this digital addendum. Having access to these fonts helped me to quickly explain the differences of Schwabacher and Fraktur to my students. And the CD holds some really nice surprises in store, too: Georg Seifert’s attempt at a modernized-yet-unromanized Fraktur, RosenRot, and its monolinear companion Rostrot — to name but one example.

Blackletter is alive, and it ain’t a zombie. Fraktur Mon Amour is both a document and a promoter of this resurrection.

Reviewed by Florian Hardwig ▪ Author Judith Schalansky ▪ Publisher Verlag Hermann Schmidt Mainz

More Reviews

In Blackletter, "Blackletters association with Nazi propaganda cast the type style as the black sheep of typography. But more and more brands are using the style as a way to bring an edgy vibe to their products." -- Sean Ashcroft --How Design

"I'm happy to confess my weakness for beautiful books like the new love letter to Blackletter typography "Fraktur Mon Amour" though I have to admit it had been some time since I came across one that stopped me in my tracks like this one did. Berlin-based designer Judith Schalansky's presentation of the typeface collection is almost more compelling than the fonts themselves. Bound like a King James Bible for font geeks and printed in contrasting black, white and shocking pink, it makes for a book that's as much a gorgeous object as it is a handy and inspiring resource." -- Brian Fichtner --Cool Hunting Blog, November 7, 2008

"Fraktur Mon Amour is essentially a compendium of currently available digital blackletter fonts (expanded to cover 333 of them) preceded by a few words by Schalansky and supplemented by a CD of 150 free fonts. Since its initial publication in 2006, it has been a raging success. The design, which deliberately thumbs its nose at the standard image of blackletter, is a key factor in that success. The book looks like a Bible with its squat proportions and placemarker ribbons except that its title and its page edges are in hot pink. Although not a shade I like, its choice as a second colour was a brilliant decision. It not only yanks blackletter out of its medieval and unfortunate political associations, but it also signals that blackletter is not inherently masculine or even black. The fonts in Fraktur Mon Amour are a mix of the excellent, the important and the trivial. But this is surely one part of its popularity. Schalansky has brought blackletter to the people. The book is a bold and welcome addition to the sparse literature on blackletter" -- Paul Shaw --Eye Magazine, Spring, 2009

"I'm happy to confess my weakness for beautiful books like the new love letter to Blackletter typography "Fraktur Mon Amour"though I have to admit it had been some time since I came across one that stopped me in my tracks like this one did. Berlin-based designer Judith Schalansky's presentation of the typeface collection is almost more compelling than the fonts themselves. Bound like a King James Bible for font geeks and printed in contrasting black, white and shocking pink, it makes for a book that's as much a gorgeous object as it is a handy and inspiring resource." -- Brian Fichtner