The starting point of the database of Global Type ist the typeface collection of Hans Reichardt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Here you can find a short description of the progress so far:
I began creating this overview after many years of collecting work from type foundries in Germany and abroad. Initially written down as a manuscript, the first attempt at publishing this material was done using metal types; the letter A was printed at the D. Stempel AG foundry. Later, the work was continued with a Linotronic photo typesetting machine, but this been broken off too.
In 1987, when I was first introduced to the Apple Macintosh computer, the idea came up to use this medium to realize the list. To preserve flexibility, the first step was to transfer the manuscript to a FileMaker database. I financed this work by selling it to the companies H. Berthold AG, Linotype AG and URW.
The collection includes typefaces from Europe, America, Asia and Australia. The basis has been the standard references (Seemann: Handbuch der Schriftarten 1926, with supplementations through 1939, Jaspert/Berry/Johnson: The Encyclopaedia of Typefaces 1970, and Mac McGrew, American Metal Typefaces of the Twentieth Century 1995).
Looking at each of these reference materials, only pieces of the whole production history of metal typefaces can be seen. With my attempt, these three collections have been compiled together for the first time, with the additional benefit of having been expanded with the data I have collected over the years. For the first time, it is possible to view the totality of typefaces created in the 20th century, even looking back into the 19th century as well. One criteria used for integrating specific typefaces has been the availability of a specific (and unmistakable) name. Typefaces where a specific name is not available come from the Seemann book list. Being a complete collection of all available typefaces at that time (1926), it even contained typefaces with obscure naming conventions that do not always allow for exact categorization, e.g., “Fraktur 1,” “Fraktur 14,” “Gotisch breit” or “Gotisch schmal” etc.
Since a simple list containing just pure data would not be very visually interesting, the idea came up to illustrate it with alphabets from PostScript and TrueType fonts, and by scanning in lines out of type specimens. Because the subsequent file size became too large after just a few of these entries, it was clear that this was not the right solution either. But Adobe’s Acrobat software was very helpful in this matter. Because of this software, the collection has been converted into PDF files, allowing it to be viewed and printed from on every Mac or PC.
Hans Reichardt
Frankfurt am Main, August 2002