“Schriften für die deutsche Jugend” ad by Union Deutsche Verlagsanstalt

Jugendstil meets blackletter: this ad was part of an insert included with Archiv für Buchgewerbe, vol. 49, no. 11/12 from November/December 1912. The featured typeface is Jaecker-Schrift, named after its designer Wilhelm Jaecker. The Stempel foundry in Frankfurt released it shortly before, in four styles; regular, mager (light), eng (condensed), and halbfett (bold).

Wilhelm Jaecker was born in Rehme and studied at the Barmer Kunstgewerbeschule, which was established in 1894 as one of the new schools in the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement. In 1912, Jaecker worked as a young book artist and calligrapher in Leipzig.

In an article from 1925, thirteen years and one world war later, Emil Wetzig described Jaecker-Schrift as a pronounced broad-nib design of Gothic character, with handwritten qualities that could not be blurred even by being cut in metal. It is broad and open, with easily legible letters and capitals that are devoid of any of the ornamental additions that one encounters in monastic manuscripts. Its designer deliberately avoided handwritten pomp in order to clear the way for his creation to meet the manifold needs of the printer. Wetzig finds it particularly well suited for job work, but less so as book typeface.

Jaecker-Schrift came accompanied by swash initials, ornamental borders, decorative elements (Zierrat) and vignettes. The ornaments and borders used in the ad seem to be taken from another, yet unidentified source, though. “Union” sports one of the swash terminal alternates included in the font. “Verlagsgesellschaft” shows three different forms for one letter: the “round” s at the end of the first word in the composite, the long ſ, and a variant of the latter to go with the ligated ch pair – chances are Stempel provided a single glyph for this trigraph that’s common in German spelling.

Union Deutsche Verlagsanstalt was a German publishing house founded in Stuttgart in 1890. It was well known for books addressing a juvenile audience, including works by Karl May, or Else Ury’s Nesthäkchen. The ad doesn’t promote a specific title, but is generally about their “Schriften für die deutsche Jugend”, literally “Writings for the German Youth”. The title’s nationalist angle is echoed by the vignette depicting an oak tree seedling.