For those of you who have been following another thread here:
http://theflourishforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=2788.0 you might recall that we started a discussion about Dutch hands, and in particular the style of window lettering in Amsterdam's brown cafés.
I ordered the book from the Dutch publisher Lecturis and got it last week! Here are my impressions.
http://www.lecturisbooks.nl/en/webshop/the-curly-letter-of-amsterdam/62955De Amsterdamse krulletter - The curly letter of Amsterdam
Author: Ramiro Espinoza
Photography: Rob Becker
Publisher: Lecturis
Year: 2015
Very peculiar these brown cafés, immortalized for all the wrong reasons, but the author, an Argentinian typography expert now living in the Netherlands, is making a case that the window lettering of the cafés is very unique and facing extinction.
The book, written in both Dutch and English, explains the history of how this consistent window lettering came to be. For us here at FF, this is of particular interest for several reasons: first of all, although it is not calligraphy per se, the hand used for this lettering is of a unique Dutch style that has roots in common with roundhand; it is very rare to be able to talk about such public forms of calligraphy; secondly, well, it's a damn pretty book, small but charming.
Espinoza explains the origin of the lettering. Jan Visser worked as a letterer in the mid twentieth century. His inspiration was from a book from 1885 by a certain P. van Looy. This book was itself derived from 17th century sources, in particular a 1659 book by J. Heuvelman, with some input from Jan van der Velde's well known 1605 book.
Visser inspired himself from all this and created a very consistent and original style of lettering that was picked up by Leo Beukeboom who continued the tradition until not so long ago. Visser and Beukeboom had contracts with beer companies and the window lettering more or less came along with the beer.
Espinoza has created a font called Krul and in the book he shows this reference type, explaining a few of the design decisions behind it, but in a nutshell he has tried to stay absolutely faithful to whatever lettering he has seen on the windows of these cafés of Amsterdam, but also of Maastricht and Ghent in Belgium.
The fate of these windows is gloomy at best. As time goes on, the windows get broken, the cafés close or renovate and this unique work gets lost. The photographs are all in black and white and expose dozens and dozens of these delightful examples of quasi-calligraphy. (I played around this weekend with a pointed pen, trying to capture some of the essence of this style, it's quite fascinating.)
The book will help, historically speaking, to preserve the work, but ultimately the craft is left with no one to pick it up. It's essentially dead, which is quite sad, but we do have a book and its wonderful pictures. The text is short but to the point and easily read.
I will add another link for you to get a feel for the sort of thing in the book, written by Espinoza himself:
http://ilovetypography.com/2012/06/18/krul-the-untold-historyof-the-amsterdamse-krulletter/One final word: A lot of the letters in this style are "ordinary" roundhand, but that is not what the eye will pick up at first. The eye immediately notices a certain Dutchness about it, for instance the way the e is shaped and that old d with its rounded stem like a mirrored 6. What makes the style wonderful in my opinion is the use of the flourishing. The S and s in particular are of interest (the capital S has a surprising mid section flourish, I'll try to post a picture of that if I get the chance) not to mention the obvious f and g minuscules, and the old style l, showing strong links to the old French hands.
As you can gather, I did enjoy the book and cannot wait to go back to Amsterdam one day.
