The Heritage of Oldřich Menhart

In 2017, when we looked at the unprocessed materials on Oldřich Menhart’s work in the National Museum Library archive in Prague, it occurred to us that Czech typography has been owed a high-quality digitization of his typefaces for many decades. In hopes of further developing the full potential of his type designs, we decided to gradually digitize all of his typefaces. We are launching our Oldřich Menhart typography collection with the first five type families: Figural, Monument, Parlament, Unciála and Vajgar.

Oldřich Menhart knew how to calligraph most of his typefaces exactly as they had been typographically produced. His typefaces do not contain a single straight line, but do contain a whole range of inventive shapes and specific details. Looking at the precise execution of the typographic cards (none of the older type sketches have been preserved), it is amazing how accurately and quickly, only on the basis of his calligraphic skill and typographic sensibility Menhart managed to design typefaces for printing that are utterly natural and organic on the page, even after complicated engraving. Menhart did not have the possibility to test and endlessly tweak his typefaces, as we do today, and yet his “first attempt” was often enough and perfect. For this reason, we did not try to improve upon Menhart’s fonts other than technically. This made their digitization that much more complicated. Although our approach remained reverent, it brought opportunities to get into Menhart’s mind and understand, if only metaphorically, the complexity of his typographic considerations. This extraordinary privilege was our primary motivation.

We would like to especially thank Pavel Menhart, without whom we would not have been able to start our project. Many thanks also go to Veronika Karfusová, Pavel Muchka and Petr Mašek of the National Museum, without whom we would not have had access to key materials for digitization. We would also like to thank Petr Dvořáček of the Chamber of Deputies Parliament of the Czech Republic Archive, and Pavel Pohlreich of the National Technical Museum, for discoveries that expanded our findings thus far. Many thanks to typographer Jan Solpera for his multiple comments and notes on editing the typefaces, Filip Blažek for the technical supervision of our fonts as well as Radek Sidun, Karel Haloun, Rostislav Vaněk, Veronika Burian and José Scaglione for their valuable suggestions. Many thanks go to Jaromír Štoural for the letterpress print-proofs of typefaces by Oldřich Menhart, Douglas Arellanes for the translation of all texts to English, Petra Rabová for editing the original Czech texts, and Jan Borecký for programming of the microsite.