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Steile Futura
In 1952, Paul Renner published Steile Futura (Berthold). Its origins were explored by type experts. I summarize their conclusions as a timeline. - From Burke's book on Paul Renner: A typeface actually called Renner-Grotesk appeared in trial type castings by Stempel type foundry in May 1936. The Stempel Renner-Grotesk was very condensed in its regular weight, with a consequent stress on the modular squareness of the letters. This design seems to have been taken over by the Bauer type foundry in 1938, and in 1939 the grotesk changed shape to some extent, becoming less modular and incorporating references to pen-made forms. The italic accompaniment to this grotesk, simply called Renner-Kursiv, was actually a true cursive, marking a decided difference between this typeface and Futura. Work on the Grotesk and Kursiv continued through the late 1930s and early 1940s. However, progress on these typefaces seems to have been very slow, perhaps due to Renner's failing health: he had a serious heart attack in 1948 (at 70 years of age) which restricted his activity. By 1951, Renner had begun to work again, and his Grotesk began to appear in 1952 from the Bauer type foundry under the name of Steile Futura. Perhaps the typeface was renamed merely in order to link it to the successful Futura family.
- Steile Futura started showing up as Bauer Topic in the mid to late 1950s.
- One of the first digitizations was Bauer Topic by Font Company, which used a VGC photo master. This digitization includes the two weights, medium and bold, both in regular and italic. The URW version of Steile Futra is called URW Topic. It is an exact copy of the VGC digital version, with every defect preserved. According to Bill Troop, Font Company did the work, and URW acquired the rights under typical IK licensing. Bill Troop continues: The FC/URW version is almost unusable because it is so amateurishly, in fact irrationally spaced and because there are so many incorrect glyphs.
- At Font Bureau in 1994, Guy Jeffrey Neslon published the great multi-width revival and extension, Tasse. Tasse has no italics though.
- Neufville (Wolfgang Hartmann's Fundicion Tipografica Bauer, or FT Bauer), who took over the Bauersche Giesserei, published the Steile Futura-inspired Futura ND Display. The FT Bauer effort does not impress Bill Troop: FT Bauer has not shown the slightest originality in any of its digitizations or design choices. If anyone is going to produce an 'original' Steile, I think it is very unlikely to be FT Bauer. Its Futura digitizations largely recklessly imitate, often point for point, previous translations of the fonts into photo from metal. Nowhere have we yet seen what we most need, a Futura intended for setting at text sizes, which in metal features the substantially reduced ascenders which are necessary to make the type viable at text sizes. Because we have not seen anything from 'FT Bauer' which in the slightest degree resembles research into original drawings or any effort to come to understand what the foundry originally did, I would conclude that FT Bauer does not actually possess any original artwork or pattern drawings, and is simply relying on precisely the same sources that are available to everyone else.
- Berthold's Steile Futura is the second original digitization.
- For typefaces further afield, see Pakenham (2000, Ray Larabie), Dinky Rink NF (2007, Nick Curtis), and Solex (Zuzana Licko).
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