Type Gallery – Albertus
Written by Berthold Wolpe himself, the story of the genesis of Albertus®:
"When I first came to London in the summer of 1932, I met Mr. Stanley Morison. He had seen photographs of some bronze inscriptions of mine which interested him and asked me to design for the Monotype Corporation a printing type of capital letters based on the lettering developed for these bronze inscriptions.
I had been through a fairly thorough training in a bronze foundry and in addition had done gold and silversmith works. Apart from this I was a student with Rudolf Koch and later became his assistant. Rudolf Koch, by the way, had a similar training and it was on his advice that I was apprenticed to the foundry.
On the bronze inscriptions mentioned, the letters were not incised but raised; in other words the background was lowered and the outline only of the letters cut in. Such a metal inscription is cut with a chisel and not drawn with a pen, which gives it sharpness without spikiness, and as the outlines of the letters are cut from outside (and not from the inside outwards), this makes for bold simplicity and reduces the serifs to a bare minimum.
A lot of nonsense has been talked about the fact that a printing type has to be designed in a much larger size. In my opinion it should be designed as near as possible to its actual size and then the necessary optical adjustments have to be made for the various other sizes which make up the family. In the case of Albertus there was very little difference between the 72 pt and the bronze inscriptions which set the style."
Download a printable sample of Albertus as a PDF.