Midnight Sailing
Contributed by Florian Hardwig on Oct 31st, 2014. Artwork published in
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American ad for North German Lloyd’s transatlantic sea passages from 1936, in Element schmalfett (1934). While there apparently was the desire to convey a deliberate teutonic look by using one of the new streamlined texturas which mushroomed in the first years of the Third Reich, Element’s gotisch ‘H’ was considered to be too much, and illegible to American eyes: It got replaced by a romanized creation with a clunky foot swash. The long ‘s’ (ſ) has been foregone, too.
On a related note, the final letter with straight descender in the shaded upright script — which provides a classy contrast, and likely is not a font — would probably pass for a ‘g’ only in the US, cf. the Berghoff sign.
1 Comment on “Midnight Sailing”
The Element type specimen (Bauer, 1934) includes a number of exemplary uses. Interestingly, there is an ad for a sea passage aboard Norddeutscher Lloyd’s Columbus among them, as well as a tourism ad for the city of Bremen (Bremen and Europa were the largest ocean liners by Norddeutscher Lloyd).