[a billhead from Joh. Enschedé en Zonen]

It’s May 6, 1936. Two things happened: The Hindenburg left for the US (where things would not go well) and Enschedé billed the publisher Brill for a bunch of type. We don’t know what type they were buying, but we look forward to someone telling us. Note, though, that they were selling type by the kilogram. We’re out of practice, but we seem to recall that 4 square inches of type weighs 1 pound. So, from the looks of it, they were buying very small quantities. But we’re leaving out the best part: the typography on the top. It’s been set in Romanée—but note those swash characters. We’re pretty sure they weren’t part of the standard italics—which makes sense, because the italics from Romanée weren’t released until 1949. So these were special sorts, probably cast just for the Enschede letterhead.* And we’d bet that these special characters were designed by Jan van Krimpen. Did he spend his type designing their stationery and rubber stamps? (Note the nicely designed rubber stamp on the lower left, to the right of the sales tax stamps.) We can’t say for sure, but probably he designed just about everything from this period.

*Hmm. A careful reader called b.s. on this claim with supporting photographs showing these characters in use elsewhere in 1932. Still, we have yet to find them shown with any Romanée specimens—but we don’t have every specimen and we don’t know everything.