What’s Online no. 6—Inland Printer 1911

The Inland Printer vol. 48 (1911–1912) is available on Google Books. Skimming through it I stumbled across this tiny item in the November 1911 issue (p. 232). I suspect the anonymous correspondent’s curiosity was piqued by the frakturstreit that occurred that year in the German Parliament.

“To satisfy himself as to the preference among German printers and publishers between the Fraktur (German) and Antiqua (Roman) types, an interested correspondent made a count of the volumes displayed at the recent annual book exposition in the German Book Trades Museum in Leipsic [sic]. Excluding serial and collective editions, there were nearly one thousand volumes, of which 705 were printed in Fraktur, 158 in Schwabacher (a variant of Fraktur, sometimes viewed as ‘old-style Fraktur’) and similar faces, and 125 in Antiqua. There appeared to be a great preference for the wide varieties of these faces, as against the lean or condensed styles.”

It should be noted that this was three years before the increase in interest in fraktur occasioned by the outbreak of World War I.