Help name my classmate’s Art Nouveau font?

Question

Dear FontIdentifers,

 

My classmate snatched up this beautiful Art Nouveau font. However the seller does not know what is called or where it is from? Hopefully you can help out?

 

Thank you!

Answer 1

Hoi Carlijn,

That’s Hermann Ihlenburg’s Childs, patented in 1892 for MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan in Philadelphia.

A few glyphs including a m n u don’t match Childs as seen in specimens from 1892 and 1893. Maybe these were recut at a later point. Or, more likely, your classmate has one of the European copies of this design – this is also suggested by the presence of accents and umlauts. Reklame-Mediaeval by Woellmer in Berlin seems to be faithful to the American original, but there were other versions which I haven’t seen in detail, like Freie Romanisch by Stempel in Frankfurt.

Comments

Hoi Florian,

Thank you so much. I have passed the information along to my classmate and he was very happy to receive it. I guess because he/we are located in the Netherlands a German manufacturer makes the most sense.

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My pleasure!

If you want to pinpoint the specific version, you could look and see if the sorts have a cast mark that identifies the manufacturer. Here’s one by Ludwig & Mayer, as an example.

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I didn't even realise I/we should look out for cast marks. I shall point it this out to my classmate. Thank you for teaching me/us.

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Not all fonts have such marks. When present, you’ll find them on the side of the sorts. According to Georg Kandler, they came up around the middle of the 19th century with manually operated casting machines, and fell out of fashion when those were replaced by faster automatic machines. Some foundries kept using the marks well into the 1940s.