#Heinz Nieth

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

This week we present a few illustrative pages from Divina Proportio Typographica: Das Buch vom Goldenen Typographischen Modul  (Divine Typographic Proportions: The Book of the Golden Typographic Module) by the Argentine typographer, designer, artist, and scholar Raúl Mario Rosarivo, translated into German by Heinz Nieth, and designed and edited by the eminent German typographer, calligrapher, and book designer Hermann Zapf. The edition was printed and bound in Krefeld, German, by Richard Scherpe in 1961 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Scherpe print shop.

Raúl Rosarivo was General Director of Talleres Gráficos de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, and in the 1940s he began an extensive analysis of early printed books by Johann Gutenberg, Peter Schöffer, Nicolas Jenson, and others. With the help of compass and ruler he described the use of the "número de oro" (golden number), by which he meant the ratio 2:3, in these early works. He published his findings as Divina proporción tipográfica in Agentina in 1947. Other editions came out in 1948 and 1953; ours is the first German language edition. In the book, Rosarivo asserts that Gutenberg used the "golden number" (or "secret number" as he also called it) to establish the harmonic relationships between the diverse parts of his printed work. Scholars at the Gutenberg Museum analyzed the findings and republished them in the January 1955 issue of their official journal Gutenberg Jahrbuch. Rosarivo’s work has had a lasting influence on type and page design concepts (see, for example, our post on Jeffrey Morin’s and Steve Ferlauto’s The Sacred Abecedarium).

Our copy of the German translation, another donation from our friend Jerry Buff, is set in Hermann Zapf’s own Optima-Antiqua from the D. Stempel type foundry, and bears Zapf’s signed presentation inscription.

View our other Typography Tuesday posts.