Dutch lettering books
with
Mathieu Lommen
The printed model or pattern book, once a source for design ideas, is now a valuable resource for historical research. Model books were essential in the classroom, the workshop and the studio to design interiors, furniture or fashion. It was very common in this genre to borrow right and left from predecessors, which makes it difficult to trace the original source of a design. A flood of primarily lithographic lettering model books and portfolios were published from the early 1830s, though they are often not to be found in traditional repositories and hardly any research has been done on them. In the 1960s the stream of lettering books began to dry up and new titles appeared only occasionally. By that time there were already various alternatives for manual lettering available to the retail trade. This lecture provides an overview of what was published in this field in the Netherlands, from high to low brow.
The Herb Lubalin Lectures are recorded and made available here and on Vimeo with the generous support of TypeCulture.
About Mathieu Lommen
