Advertising Arts, March 1935

Photo(s) by mikeyashworth. Imported from Flickr on Jul 21, 2024. Artwork published in

March 1935

Advertising Arts was a quarterly supplement to the weekly trade magazine Advertising & Selling, published between 1930 and 1939. See Steve Heller’s article on Typotheque.com for more info. Shown here is the cover and the table of contents for the March 1935 issue.

The former features Imre Reiner’s Corvinus, in caps from the fett and Kursiv mager styles. Note the swash M in “March”. The latter is set entirely in styles from Rudolf Koch’s Eve series, known in Germany under the name Koch-Antiqua.

Typefaces

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Artwork location

United States (8578)
New York City (2433)

In Sets

Mike Ashworth Collection (Fonts In Use Staff) (64)

1 Comment on “Advertising Arts, March 1935”

Florian Hardwig says:
Jul 21st, 2024 3:09 pm

Over on Flickr, commentator Sludge G wondered about the various letterforms in Koch-Antiqua:

Why are there two different Bs? cf Faber Birren vs Brissaud?

I’ll repost my reply below.

It’s a little confusing indeed, and that starts with the name(s). As Mike mentions, Koch-Antiqua was known as Eve in the US. In the UK, however, it was distributed under the name Locarno.

There’s the roman, or upright (1), and a second set of decorated caps with a handtooled main stroke (2). Then there’s the italic, Koch-Antiqua-Kursiv, which has plain capitals in sizes from 6 to 10 pt (3). In sizes from 12 pt upwards, they have a second stroke that adds some weight and sparkle (4). Additionally, there were alternative swash caps for the italic (5). In sum, you’ll get five different forms […] Take the letter A, for example. It’s represented with all five forms in this application.
(1) in “Automobile Show” (line 13)
(2) in “Advertising Arts” (lines 1–2)
(3) in “Devoted to the Design of Advertsing” (line 3)
(4) in “Egmont Arens” (line 7)
(5) in “Advertising Arts is published bi-monthly” (footer)

And that’s not even everything. The family additionally comprises a set of alternates with extra tall capitals and lowercase letters with longer ascenders, as well as a set of initials. And I haven’t started with the bolder weights yet: there’s grob (semibold), Kursiv grob, and fett (heavy).

As the type was supplied by Contintental Typefounders, the designer of this page wanted to show off as many features as possible. In most applications, you won’t find as much variety. In fact, I don’t think the italic swash caps were very popular.