Join Bethany, a literary researcher with a passion for the obscure, as she shares recovered and uncovered stories from archives around the world.

For season one, we'll be talking all about the (mostly) forgotten women of the metal type era, a time when Monotype and Linotype technologies changed printing forever. From designing fonts to Leipzig's 1914 Internationale Ausstellung für Buchgewerbe und Graphik, typography histories to disinformation campaigns, we'll look at women designing typefaces from the late 1800s to 1950s around the world. Come for the archives, stay for the stories. This is archival recovery, out loud.

Additional Music:
"Despair Metal Trailer" by LiteSaturation

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Credits
Creator and Producer: Bethany Qualls
Editor: Joe DeGrand
Original episode artwork: Trifoxatops aka Jenna Mauro
Social Media Whisperer: Elizabeth Giardina
Music: "Sneaky Feet" by geoffharvey

Like what you hear? Keep listening! Subscribe to Re(un)Covered wherever you get your podcasts.

Want to chat? Follow us on Instagram or send us an email.

“Why did you rub the lamp that contains me?” 🧞

Joe and Bethany cover what you’ll be hearing on Re(un)Covered, what is archival recovery, some feminist history, and how knowing a more inclusive past can help us make a better future. Also: dinosaurs 🦖🦕🐓.

Season 1 of Re(un)Covered talks about women who designed typefaces in the hot metal type era (late 1800s to 1950s). For each episode Bethany and Joe will talk about what we know (and don’t know) about one or two of these women type designers, then Bethany will chat with a special guest about the designer and/or the episode’s broader theme. If you want to see hot metal type in action, Monotype and Linotype technologies are good places to start.

PSA: everything important has not been digitized. Don't be fooled.

References (we love citing sources here) 📚

Foundational research on women metal type designers:

• Club of Printing Women of New York, Antique, Modern & Swash: A Brief History of Women in Printing (1955)
• Laura Webber, "Women Typeface Designers" (MS thesis, RIT, 1997)
• Gerda Breuer and Julia Meer, eds, Women in Graphic Design 1890-2012 (Jovis, 2012)
• Alphabettes, “Women in Type Bibliography” (2020)
• Yulia Popova, How many female type designers do you know? I know many and talked to some! (Onomatopee, 2020)
• Fiona Ross, Alice Savoie, and Dr. Helena Lekka, Women in Type (2018–2021)
• Lauren Elle DeGaine, "A Woman’s Type: Early Women Type Designers in 20th-Century Book History," (MA thesis, University of Victoria (B.C.), 2021)

Also props to these folks for their ideas about how history works, archival gaps:

• For critical fabulation as a concept, see Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.
• Jenny Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss (Northwestern, 2020)
• Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Duke University Press, 2005)

Support the show

Credits
Creator and Producer: Bethany Qualls
Editor: Joe DeGrand
Original episode artwork: Trifoxatops aka Jenna Mauro
Social Media Whisperer: Elizabeth Giardina
Music: "Sneaky Feet" by geoffharvey

Like what you hear? Keep listening! Subscribe to Re(un)Covered wherever you get your podcasts.

Want to chat? Follow us on Instagram or send us an email.

“History: problematic and cool, all at once” 📜✒️🗃️

Anna Simons (1871–1951) taught hand lettering to a generation of designers. She studied calligraphy with Edward Johnston at Royal College of Art (UK), then taught courses in his place in Germany and translated his work into German. After WWI Simons went on to teach how to use broad nib pens across Europe for decades. She also designed some 1400 titles and initials for Bremer Press.🖋️

Simons was part of the BUGRA (Weltaustellung für BUchgewerbe und GRAfik; the International Exhibition for the Book Trade and Graphic Design) in May 1914 in Das Haus der Frau (The House of Women) pavilion. She was listed as a Schriftkünstlerin (type artist) but did not design typefaces. The bombing of Munich in 1944 destroyed her home and the Bremer Press building. She won many awards, influenced many designers, and died in 1951.

Since we’re talking about typography and design this season, this episode also helps everyone get on the same page about what type design includes, some key terms (letterforms, typefaces, typography, type design, typographer, fonts...), and where the metal type era fits into the bigger history of design. Nina and Bethany even talk about Comic Sans (“not that horrible“), why design is never neutral, and the “inspiration soup” that’s all around us. Plus how type design’s history of self-mythologizing influences what we know today.

Special guest: Nina Stössinger, type designer at Frere-Jones Type, teacher at Yale School of Art, fan of Nicolas Jenson’s Roman typeface

PSA: How often do you think about the Roman empire?

References 📚 Samples of Anna Simons’s work (mostly in German):

• with Peter Behrens, Dem Deutschen Volke ("To the German People") on the German Reichstag building, Berlin (1916)
• Bremer Press lettering work: Titel und Initialen für die Bremer Presse, Bremer Presse, 1926 (images via UW-Milwaukee Special Collections)
• “Der Staatliche Schriftkurs in Neubabelsberg,” Kunstgewerbeblatt, March 1910, pp. 101–7 (Simons’s students work on pp. 108-13)
• Want more? Search for Anna Simons in Gebrauchsgraphik and other period trade publications via the International Advertising & Design Database.
• See also German Designers, Luc Devroye, and A Short Introduction to Graphic Design History

Support the show

Credits
Creator and Producer: Bethany Qualls
Editor: Joe DeGrand
Original episode artwork: Trifoxatops aka Jenna Mauro
Social Media Whisperer: Elizabeth Giardina
Music: "Sneaky Feet" by geoffharvey

Like what you hear? Keep listening! Subscribe to Re(un)Covered wherever you get your podcasts.

Want to chat? Follow us on Instagram or send us an email.