[Mergenthaler Linotype Company]: MEMPHIS LIGHT AND BOLD. Brooklyn: Mergenthaler Linotype Company, [c. 1930]. Original edition. Slim quarto. Printed and saddle-stitched self wrappers 16 pp. Type line and weight specimans and layout suggestions. Elaborate graphic design throughout. Machine punched for three ring binding. Interior unmarked, bright and very clean. Out-of-print. Lightly handled, but a fine copy.
7.5 x 10.5 saddle stitched booklet with 16 pages devoted to the uses of Linotype Memphis in Light and Bold weights. An exceptional snapshot of the typesetting industry during the Interwar years and a fine document from the Mechanical Age of Graphic Design. Memphis has an Egyptian name, in reference to the fact that early slab serifs were often called “Egyptians” as an exoticism by nineteenth-century typefounders.
Memphis is a slab-serif typeface designed by German font designer Dr. Rudolf Wolf and released in 1929 by the Stempel Type Foundry. Wolf was the first type designer to combine slab serifs with the forms of sans serif fonts.
Memphis is a "geometric" slab serif, reflecting the style of German geometric sans-serifs (in particular Futura) which had attracted considerable attention, and adapting the design to the slab serif structure. Its structure is strictly monoline, with a "single-storey" 'a' similar to blackletter or handwriting, in an almost-perfect circle. It was released in several weights and with alternative characters such as swashes, which digitisations have mostly not included.
Memphis and other similar designs were popular in printing during the hot metal typesetting period and several foundries brought out similar designs or direct imitations such as Karnak and Stymie in the United States and Rosmini from Nebiolo in Italy, and (more loosely) Rockwell from Monotype. Digital designs in a similar style include Neutraface Slab and Archer. Memphis itself has been released digitally by Linotype, who licensed it from Stempel, and by Bitstream in a release including condensed weights under the name “Geometric Slabserif 703.”
Ottmar Mergenthaler (1854–1899) demonstrated the first linecasting machine to the editors of the New York Tribune in 1886. Four years later, the inventor of the type setting machine founded the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. Major newspapers around the world quickly adopted this machine. The “Line-o-type” provided a new freedom in the creation of everything printed from newspapers to books, from advertisements to a wide range of literature. Before typesetting referred to more than making selections from a pull-down menu, Mergenthaler’s Linotype machine provided typesetters and designers with a previously-unknown level of freedom for envisioning the printed word.
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