THE WORK OF BERTHOLD WOLPE
Berthold Wolpe has acquired some reputation
in this country as the designer of Monotype Albertus,
but he is not only a type-designer.
In this article Nicholas Drew gives some account
of Wolpe's career and his activities
as a designer of books, ornaments and letter forms
the border DESIGN which is shown on the
opposite page is very heavy, and to many printers,
designers and typographers who have been
reared in the French sixteenth-century flower
tradition of the Garamond school, will come as
something of a shock, but few will deny the
strength and forcefulness of the patterns. The
border is one of many designed by Berthold
Wolpe for the exclusive use of the Fanfare Press,
and I mention those characteristics of strength
and forcefulness at this early stage in these notes
as they are apparent in all his work.
Berthold Wolpe was born at Offenbach on
Main in 1905. He is inclined to trace his interest
in the graphic arts to a great-grandfather who was
a wood-engraver in that town towards the end of
the eighteenth century. The impulse towards the
arts and crafts jumped two generations after that,
and Wolpe's own father was a dental surgeon, but
there are probably many psychologists who
would trace the certainty and sureness of Wolpe's
engraving to the parental touch.
Whatever the reason, the youthful Wolpe had
only one desire to make things, and instead of
entering the university in the family tradition he
was apprenticed to a firm of metal founders in
Frankfort. (He must have been extraordinarily
sure of his vocation to undertake in this willing
manner the exacting and arduous training which
such an apprenticeship entails.) At the end of
his apprenticeship in 1926 Wolpe entered
Offenbach Art School where he had previously
been taught as a part-time pupil by the German
type-designer of international fame, Rudolf Koch.
This association with Koch, started in this
manner, continued until Koch's death in 1934.
Koch was, indeed, the guiding light during all
Berthold Wolpe's years of training, and even
during the period when Wolpe (on Koch's advice)
left Offenbach to study at the Berlin School of
Art and came under the influence of other
teachers the great German master's was the main
influence upon Wolpe's development as a designer.
During these early years Wolpe practised many
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