Engraving and Blackletter

Where Blackletter Came From §

The Bible printed at Mainz in the 1450s did not invent a new shape of letter. Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, describing its leaf of that Bible, says it “was printed with type cut following the model of the book hand used in western Germany during the fifteenth century to write liturgical manuscripts. It is known as textura and is a formal upright and angular hand, the letters having pointed feet and little curvature.”¹ Columbia dates the leaf “ca. 1454-1455, Not after August 1456” and gives the printer as “Johann Gutenberg and Peter Schöffer?”, question mark and all.

The National Diet Library of Japan calls the hand textura quadrata, “which had been used for bibles and liturgies of those days,” and says that among early printed books the textura type “was mainly employed for books used in churches.”² Its example of the face is taken from a Dominican Missal printed at Venice in 1482. The Harry Ransom Center in Texas adds that the large format of the Gutenberg Bible “was suitable for use on the lectern, from which the original owners would have read aloud in religious service.”³

One Name, Several Letters §

“Blackletter” names more than one face. The National Diet Library divides the Gothic types of the fifteenth century into three kinds: textura, the sharp-cornered letter of church books; a rounder kind, which includes the rotunda first written in Bologna in the twelfth century; and a slanted, cursive kind called lettre bâtarde, which French and English printers of the fifteenth century often used for books in their own languages. Around 1480 a curving bâtarde called Schwabacher came into use in Germany and Switzerland, and in the early sixteenth century it “developed into a more expressive one called ‘Fraktur.’”²

The word “Gothic” was not a compliment. It “came from the views of the Renaissance-period humanists who regarded the Gothic type as Goth (like the Goths, barbarous or uncouth) as compared to the Roman type,” the same library explains. The humanists tried to revive an older script, the Carolingian minuscule, and roman type was born of that revival. Nicholas Jenson, who printed a Bible at Venice in 1476 in a rotunda, is best known for the roman types he made for classical literature, the Ransom Center notes.³

Fraktur turns up on holy cards too. In 2013 Colleen Hoelscher, an archivist at the University of Dayton, was transcribing holy cards in the university’s collections, some of them in German, so that their words could be searched. “Fraktur is a form of Blackletter, or Gothic script, that was used in Germany until around World War II,” she wrote, and some of the letters “look completely different in the Fraktur font than they do in our regular scripts.”⁴

What Engraving Is §

Engraving is a different craft. “The highly skilled craft of engraving, in which a wedge-shaped metal tool known as a burin is used to gouge clear, sharp furrows in a metal plate, appears to have been adapted from goldsmithing,” writes Wendy Thompson of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “The earliest engravings were produced in Germany in the 1430s.”⁵

The Wierix engravers of Antwerp made devotional prints only a few inches high, and the Wellcome Collection in London holds several. One, by Hieronymus Wierix, shows the Annunciation inside a ring of rosary beads, in an image 9.9 by 6.1 centimeters. Around it run the Litany of Loreto, the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary and two prayers under the word Oremus, and at the foot a dedication “Sodalibus D.V. Mariae,” to the members of a sodality of the Virgin Mary.⁶ In the image the Wellcome publishes, every word is in roman and italic letters, not blackletter. A Saint Francisca Romana (Frances of Rome) by the same engraver, in an image 10.7 by 8.3 centimeters, is catalogued to the first decade of the 1600s.⁷

Prints like these are far older than any Mass card in the record we found (the history of the Mass card). How old the holy card is depends on whom you ask. The Marian Library at Dayton describes a collection of “over 18,000 Catholic holy cards dating from circa 1675 through the present day,” funeral cards among them.⁸ The university’s own archivist wrote in 2013 that holy cards “were first produced in Europe in the nineteenth century.”⁴ Neither page says what it counts as a holy card, and no source we opened settles the difference.

How Two Cards Were Printed §

The few catalogue records we found that describe a card’s making name the trades, and none names a typeface. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a memorial card printed in London in 1861 by J. T. Wood for Prince Albert. It is not a Catholic card, but the museum’s record is careful about how it was made: “Embossed and pierced card, with letterpress and lithography,” with a black border that the museum says was common on mourning stationery, and with “the lettering taking the form of a carved inscription.”⁹ The University of Maryland holds a Mass card of 1965 from the nuns of Stanbrook Abbey in England, with “lithography by Messrs. W.S. Cowell Ltd., letterpress by Stanbrook.”¹⁰ Neither record says what letters the words were set in.

What the Record Doesn’t Say §

We found no source that says when blackletter first appeared on a Mass card or a memorial card, or that printers and parishes chose it because it was the letter of the Church’s books. Some pages that rank for these questions reach into the Reformation instead. One says that Martin Luther “wanted to differentiate Catholic scripture from Protestant ones, effectively designating blackletter as the official Protestant typeface.”¹¹ It cites no source for that, and we make no claim about it either way.

The Church’s law has nothing to say about lettering. None of the canons on Mass offerings mentions a card at all (canons 945 to 958). What they do set down concerns the offering and the Mass owed for it: each offering given and accepted, for one, is owed a Mass of its own (canon 948).

Our Own Lettering §

Memento takes its name from the words Memento, Domine, “Remember, Lord,” in the Roman Canon (the prayer), and its wordmark is set in blackletter, in a free typeface called UnifrakturMaguntia. Its description in the Google Fonts library calls it “based on Peter Wiegel’s font Berthold Mainzer Fraktur which is in turn based on a 1901 typeface by Carl Albert Fahrenwaldt.”¹² It is a Fraktur, then, of the German branch, and not the textura of Gutenberg’s Bible. The word is set in lower case with one gold letter, the t, whose crossbar is the letter’s own: no cross has been drawn in.

The small Latin lines over the sections of this site, such as Tolle, lege over the Library, are set in the italic of Junicode, which its own site calls a “free font for medievalists, linguists, and specialists in many academic disciplines.”¹³ The Mass card our software prints for a parish, until the parish designs its own, is not blackletter either: it is set in Instrument Serif, with Inter for the short lines in capitals. A parish that designs its own card can choose one blackletter, Texturina, which the Google Fonts library describes as “a highly applicable typeface with the richness of Blackletter, yet maintaining fluidity by combining broken and softened curves.”¹⁴

Where to See Them §

Several of the collections in this piece can be seen online. Columbia’s exhibition “Type to Print” sets handwritten textura beside Gutenberg’s page.¹⁵ The Wellcome Collection shows the Wierix engravings, and the Marian Library has put a selection of its holy cards online.⁸ If you’d like a Mass card for someone, ask your parish office about the cards it uses (what to write in one).