Letterforms - I

Lucas Kilian
Ornamental Letter W
1627
engraving
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Lucian Bernhard
Aviation Exhibition, Berlin
1909
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Lex Reitsma
Theo van Doesburg
2000
offset-print (exhibition poster)
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Richard Long
A Random Bicycle Ride
1981
screenprint
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Fritz Rehm
Le Délice Cigarette Papers
1910
lithograph (poster)
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Anonymous German Designer
Ex Libris - Hagenreiner
ca. 1795
letterpress
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wulfenbüttel

Anonymous German Designer
Ex Libris - Knöringen
ca. 1750-1800
letterpress
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wulfenbüttel

Anonymous Austrian Printmaker
Fledermaus - Miss Young
1910
lithograph (poster for cabaret)
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Moriz Jung
Fledermaus
1910
lithograph (poster for cabaret)
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Klinger-Julius-
Osram Lampe
1908
lithograph (poster)
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Eric Gill (designer)
Railway Station Advertising
ca. 1909
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Anonymous Italian Artist
Portrait of Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma
17th century
engraving and letterpress
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Hollerbaum & Schmidt (printers)
Möbelmesse
(furniture fair)
1912
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Schnebel-Karl-
Die Gartenlaube
(magazine)
ca. 1910
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Anonymous Swedish Designer
Klädd & Oklädd, Nationalmuseum
(dressed and undressed)
1996
lithograph (exhibition poster)
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Heinrich Aldegrever
Putti supporting Tablet with Roman Alphabet
1535
engraving
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

They planted me, a walnut-tree, by the roadside to amuse passing boys, as a mark for their well-aimed stones. And all my twigs and flourishing shoots are broken, hit as I am by showers of pebbles. It is no advantage for trees to be fruitful. I indeed, poor tree, bore fruit only for my own undoing. 

Zeus, who ruled the holy land of Corcyra, though thy ears be ever full of the fears of suppliants or the thanks of those whose prayer thou hast heard, yet hearken to me, too, and grant me by a true promise that this be the land of my exile, and that I may dwell in my native land, my long labours over. 

I, Sir, who once gained the crown on the banks of Alpheius, and was twice proclaimed victor by the water of Castalia; I, who was announced the winner at Nemea, and formerly, as a colt, at Isthmus; I, who ran swift as the winged winds – see me now, how in my old age I turn the rotating stone, driven in mockery of the crowns I won. 

The temple servants destined as an acceptable sacrifice to Latona's daughter a heifer big with young; but happy birth-pangs anticipated her approaching death, and she was sent to the herd to bear her child in freedom. For the goddess who presides over child-bed deemed it not right to slay creatures in labour, having learnt to pity them.

The husbandman Archippus, when, smitten by grave sickness, he was just breathing his last and gliding to Hades, spoke thus to his sons: "I charge you, dear children, that ye love the mattock and the life of a farmer. Look not with favour on the weary labour of them who sail the treacherous waves and the heavy toil of perilous sea-faring. Even as a mother is sweeter than a stepmother, so is the land more to be desired than the grey sea." 

This is the book of learned Aratus, whose subtle mind explored the long-lived stars, both the fixed stars and the planets with which the bright revolving heaven is set. Let us praise him for the great task at which he toiled; let us count him second to Zeus, in that he made the stars brighter. 

– from Book IX (Declamatory and Descriptive Epigrams) of the Greek Anthology, translated and edited by W.R. Paton (1917)