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ABOUT

Johann Michael Fleischmann

Or Fleischman, with one "n". A German punchcutter (b. Nuremberg, 1701, d. Amsterdam, 1768) who lived in Amsterdam, and practiced his art at Enschedé in Haarlem, from 1743-1768. Enschedé's 1768 specimen book, Proef van Letteren shows most of his typefaces, starting as early as 1734. All his surviving punches and matrices are now in the possession of the Enschedés. His work influenced even Bodoni. His foremost typeface is the 8-point roman from 1739. That typeface has seen many metal versions, and even more digitizations. Among the metal re-cuts, one was due to Georg Belwe. There is a Fleischmann typeface at L. Wagner (1927), and a version at Typoart. Berry, Johnson and Jaspert write: His roman types are rather condensed and of a large x-height. His design is approaching the modern; the stress in some letters is vertical and the serifs are nearer the horizontal. In the upper case the long arms of the E and the squareness of the M are to be noted. In the lower case the g is conspicuous with bulbous ear and rounded link The italic rather less steeply inclined than the old face italics but still somewhat irregular The figures are still old face. Among the digitizations, we have:

• At the Dutch Type Library, DTL Fleischmann (1992, Erhard Kaiser).
• Fleischmann BT Pro (2002, Charles Gibbons). Heralded by the typophiles as outperforming the DTL Fleischmann.
• While studying at KABK in 2012, Hrvoje Zivcic did a revival of Fleischmann's 8-point roman from 1739 entitled Slagerij.
• A liberal revival called Gilly was developed by Porter Gillespie in 2015 at Type@Paris.

Fleischmann created blackletter typefaces such as Holländische Gotisch (1739-1760, digitally revived by Gerhard Helzel; Manfred Klein and Petra Heidorn made the free revival also called Holland-Gotisch, in 2005 and mention that their source was "Nederduits"; see the Fleischmann Flamande), Mediaan Duyts (1744) and Fleischmann Gotisch (ca. 1750, digitally revived by Ingo Preuss in 2004 as Fleischmann Gotisch PT, by SoftMaker in 2016 as Fleischmann Gotisch Pro, and by Alter Littera in 2012 as Nederduits).

Fleischmann was also renowned for his work on music typography. He worked for the publisher Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf, who was interested in improving the typography of musical notation. Fleischmann created a complex music notation font that proved unsuccessful in the marketplace, but was subsequently used to create many designs including the decorative edging on the first Dutch banknote called the roodborstje (robin).

EXTERNAL LINKS
Johann Michael Fleischmann
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Klingspor Museum page
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INTERNAL LINKS
Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Dutch type design ⦿ Blackletter fonts ⦿ German type scene ⦿ Modern style [Bodoni, Didot, Walbaum, Thorowgood, Computer Modern, etc.] ⦿ Music fonts ⦿