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Odlewnia Czcionek Jan Idzkowski i S-ka [Janusz Marian Nowacki]

Gisernia Jan Idzkowski i S-ka, founded in Warsaw by Jan Nepomucen Idźkowski and o³zef Drozdowski, was inaugurated in 1909, five years before the start of World War I. Initially, German typefaces were imported and copieds.nd often Idzkowski changed the names of the fonts.

At e-foundry, Janusz M. Nowacki extended and digitized one of their high-contrast typefaces, and called it Cyklop (2008). Free downloads here. Nowacki explains: The Cyclop typeface was designed in the 1920s at the workshop of Warsaw type foundry "Odlewnia Czcionek J. Idzkowski i S-ka". This sans serif typeface has a highly modulated stroke so it has high typographic contrast. The vertical stems are much heavier then horizontal ones. Most characters have thin rectangles as additional counters giving the unique shape of the characters. The lead types of Cyclop typeface were produced in slanted variant at sizes 8-48 pt. It was heavily used for heads in newspapers and accidents prints. Typesetters used Cyclop in the inter-war period, during the occupation in the underground press. The typeface was used until the beginnings of the offset print and computer typesetting era. Nowadays it is hard to find the metal types of this typeface. The font was generated using the Metatype1 package. Then the original set of characters was completed by adding the full set of accented letters and characters of the modern Latin alphabets (including Vietnamese).

Berthold (Berlin) created their successful Secession typeface in 1901 (halbfette in 1903 and contour and fette in 1907). It was one of the typefaces imported (copied) by Idzkowski, who changed the name to Renesans. Renesans was used in Poland until the second half of the 20th century. In the interwar period, it was often used in titles as well as in advertisements and advertising texts. The casting matrices of three sets of the Renesans typeface are kept in Lodz by the Book Art Museum run by Jadwiga and Janusz Pawel Tryzn. Renesans was digitally revived in 2020 by Borys Kosmynka and Ania Wielunska. It can be downloaded here. At that same site, one can find a paper by Andrzej Tomaszewski on the history of Renesans.

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The Polish type scene ⦿ Extinct 20th century foundries ⦿