Oak Knoll

First edition and one of 250 numbered copies. Prospectus loosely inserted. Fine in fine slipcase.

Lovers of beautiful books, elegant design, and clear typography will be thrilled with this new volume about the book artist, Emil Rudolf Weiss.

Weiss stands high in the pantheon of great book artists that includes William Morris, Bruce Rogers and Francis Meynell, among others. However, because his work was mostly in Germany, he tends to be less well known in the English speaking world; certainly not much has been written about him or his work in English since the 1930s. Yet he was sufficiently regarded by Stanley Morison to be a guest designer for an issue of The Fleuron; another issue of which included an essay by Morison about Weiss ornaments. His Weiss-Antiqua typeface was particularly popular in the USA, mainly due to the availability for slug casting through Intertype matrices and the publicity work of the Bauer Type Foundry office in New York. Today, most of us have, perhaps unknowingly, seen the digital version of Weiss roman, if not the original metal version. It remains a popular typeface, particularly in book work where its recent outings include the dust-jacket of the US edition of The Da Vinci Code and the UK edition of Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen.

Jerry Cinamon studied graphic design at the Yale School of Art & Architecture and first came across Weiss Initials while working in New York in the early 1960s. He had a long and successful career working at Penguin books, learning German after his retirement to produce his excellent biography of Rudolf Koch (Oak Knoll, 2000).