47 Facts About Hermann Zapf

Hermann Zapf was a German type designer and calligrapher who lived in Darmstadt, Germany.

Hermann Zapf was married to the calligrapher and typeface designer Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse.

Hermann Zapf is considered one of the greatest type designers of all time.

Famine later struck Germany, and Hermann Zapf's mother was grateful to send him to school in 1925, where he received daily meals in a program organized by Herbert Hoover.

Hermann Zapf left school in 1933 with the ambition of pursuing a career in electrical engineering.

Under the new political regime, Hermann Zapf was not able to attend the Ohm Technical Institute in Nuremberg, and therefore he needed to find an apprenticeship.

However, they allowed him to become a retoucher, and Hermann Zapf began his four-year apprenticeship in February 1934.

In 1935, Hermann Zapf attended an exhibition in Nuremberg in honor of the late typographer Rudolf Koch.

Hermann Zapf bought two books there, using them to teach himself calligraphy.

Hermann Zapf studied examples of calligraphy in the Nuremberg city library.

Soon, his master noticed his expertise in calligraphy, and Hermann Zapf's work shifted to retouching lettering and improving his colleagues' retouching.

Hermann Zapf did not bear a journeyman's certificate and thus would not be able to get a work permit at another company in Nuremberg, as they would not have been able to check on his qualifications.

Hermann Zapf went to the Werkstatt Haus zum Fursteneck, a building run by Paul Koch, son of Rudolf Koch.

Hermann Zapf spent most of his time there working in typography and writing songbooks.

On 1 April 1939, Hermann Zapf was conscripted and sent to Pirmasens to help reinforce the Siegfried Line against France.

However, because of his heart trouble, Hermann Zapf was not transferred to the Wehrmacht but was instead dismissed.

Hermann Zapf had been chosen for the Luftwaffe, but instead was sent to the artillery in Weimar.

Hermann Zapf did not perform well, confusing left and right during training and being too cautious and clumsy with his gun.

Hermann Zapf was sent back to the office and then to Juterbog to train as a cartographer.

Hermann Zapf's eyesight was so good that he could write letters 1 millimeter in height without using a magnifying glass, and this skill probably prevented him from being commissioned back into the army.

Hermann Zapf was treated with respect because of his artwork and, on account of his poor health, was sent home only four weeks after the end of the war.

Hermann Zapf went back to Nuremberg, which had suffered great damage in air raids.

Hermann Zapf returned to Frankfurt in 1947, where the type foundry Stempel offered him a position as artistic head of their printshop.

From 1948 to 1950, Hermann Zapf taught calligraphy at the Arts and Crafts School in Offenbach, giving lettering lessons twice a week to two classes of graphics students.

Hermann Zapf worked for various publishing houses, including Suhrkamp Verlag, Insel Verlag, Buchergilde Gutenberg, Hanser Verlag, Dr Ludwig Reichert Verlag, and Verlag Philipp von Zabern.

Hermann Zapf intended the design to bridge serifs and sans serifs and to be suitable for both headings and continuous passages of text.

Hermann Zapf's typefaces have been widely copied, sometimes against his will.

In 1993, Hermann Zapf resigned from ATypI over what he viewed as its hypocritical attitude toward unauthorized copying by prominent ATypI members.

Sometimes Hermann Zapf worked with a font maker to make new versions of his existing typefaces created for another company.

For example, in the 1980s Hermann Zapf worked with Bitstream to make versions of many of his prior typefaces, including Palatino, Optima and Melior, all with "Hermann Zapf" in their new names.

Hermann Zapf is considered one of the great calligraphers, but he did not work extensively doing commercial lettering and calligraphy.

Hermann Zapf's calligraphy was primarily limited to studies and personal works of art.

Hermann Zapf taught calligraphy as a part of his workshops every summer at Rochester Institute of Technology during the 1980s.

Hermann Zapf worked on typography for computer programs from the 1960s onwards.

Hermann Zapf's ideas were considered radical, not taken seriously in Germany, and rejected by the Technische Universitat Darmstadt, where he lectured from 1972 to 1981.

The University of Texas at Austin was interested in Hermann Zapf and offered him a professorship, which he did not take, because his wife opposed a move to that state.

Hermann Zapf taught there from 1977 to 1987, flying between Darmstadt and Rochester.

Hermann Zapf knew that he could not run an American company from Darmstadt and did not want to move to New York.

In 1983, Hermann Zapf completed the typeface AMS Euler with Donald Knuth and graduate students in Knuth's and Charles Bigelow's digital typography program at Stanford University, including students Dan Mills, Carol Twombly, and David Siegel and Knuth's computer science PhD students Scott Kim and John Hobby, for the American Mathematical Society.

However, Hermann Zapf remembered a page of calligraphy from his sketchbook from 1944 and considered the possibility of making a typeface from it.

Hermann Zapf had tried to create a calligraphic typeface for Stempel in 1948, but hot metal composition placed too many limits on the freedom of swash characters.

However, just before the project was completed, Siegel wrote a letter to Hermann Zapf, saying that his girlfriend had left him and that he had lost all interest in anything.

Hermann Zapf was prepared to complete it and reorganized the project.

Hermann Zapf worked with Linotype to create four alphabets and various ornaments, flourishes, and other dingbats.

Hermann Zapf died on 4 June 2015, at the age of 96 in Darmstadt, Germany.

Zapf starred in the film The Art of Hermann Zapf, produced in 1967 at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City, Missouri, and in Zapf's design studio in Dreieichenhain, Germany.

Hermann Zapf was featured in the 2007 documentary Helvetica, by Gary Hustwit.