On assessing the early work by Jan van Krimpen one is struck by the seemingly Germanic influence apparent in design and letterform. It is only after one realizes that, at the moment van Krimpen became interested in them, German printing and lettering manifested the teachings of Johnston and Gill, that this influence is seen to be more English than Germanic.

Anna Simons taught lettering, as a stand-in for her teacher Johnston, in a State promoted course for art teachers at Düsseldorf. Count Kessler commissioned Johnston, Gill, and Noel Rooke to do lettering and wood engravings for his Cranach Presse and for the Insel Verlag, the great publishing house he was connected with. Johnston even designed a type for Kessler.

Mason and Emery Walker wrote articles and supervised influential German printing. Even Johnston’s classic treatise illuminating writing and lettering was read by van Krimpen in Anna Simons’ translation. At that time the Germans were as assiduous in the buying of talent as the Americans are now.

All this activity started as early as 1904 or 1905 and culminated in the Graphic Art Exhibition of 1914 at Leipzig; Newdigate said that he seemed to see, in the German Pavilions, ‛the hand of Johnson on every stall and on every wall’. Young van Krimpen avidly studied all there was to be seen.

Meanwhile a significant thing had happened in Holland. De Roos had designed a new and original typeface, produced by the Amsterdam Typefoundry. The type was an instant success and is in use to the present day. Van Krimpen used this Hollandsche Mediaeval up to the 1920’s when he and his friends were influenced by the renaissance of Caslon in England. Then for several years he used Caslon almost exclusively.

Jean François van Royen paved the way for van Krimpen’s later development, when he suggested that some of the ancient typefaces owned by the Enschedé’s should be used for the Zilverdistel publications. This first contact by van Krimpen with the Enschedé firm became a lifelong companionship, the incidents of which are excellently described in Dreyfus’ book on van Krimpen.

In the meantime his own lettering lost much of the ‛drawn’ character so evident in de Roos’ work.

The Lutetia face was the culmination of this slow development towards the printing type that was bound to come. To the mind of the present writer the first cutting of Lutetia after van Krimpen’s drawings, but without his personal supervision during the making of the punches, is more successful than the later version. The punchcutter, in his unhampered rendering of the designer’s drawings, seems to have interpreted rather than followed them, producing a happy looking typeface. The designer, however, insisted on a recutting of the type and although it certainly is flawless in its final form it has a slightly stilted look which is absent from the first version. On the other hand the symbiosis between van Krimpen and his punchcutter Rädisch proved to be beneficial to both.

Van Krimpen’s designs became more and more finished leaving nothing to the punchcutter’s initiative, the daily contact between the designer and punchcutter grew to perfect understanding, and the designer thought more and more, as it were, ‛in steel’, learning to appreciate the delicate adjustments the good punchcutter makes almost without realizing what he or his tools do to the design.

The almost funny mistake of trying to design a roman to an existing seventeenth-century italic by Van Dijck type shows how little chance the artist has to step out of his own time. Instead of a successful resurrection, like many of the well-known book faces in everyday use now, Romanée, intended to be a copy of an old type, became a wholly independent design. It shows once more how personality, if any, shows in the handiwork even if the perpetrator wants to suppress it.

The two decades that passed between the designing of the roman and the italic made for a discrepancy. United they fall, apart they stand as fine designs. In Spectrum the solution was found. Roman and italic are in perfect harmony, though the present writer thinks of Romanée as the finest roman van Krimpen designed.

Jan van Krimpen’s work as a typographer is well known in Britain. Not so well known, perhaps, in that country are the books he did for American and French publishers. A double title of a book done for George Macy’s Heritage Press in New York are included in the inset.

The few examples illustrated can do little to give the reader an idea of the development of the complex nature of van Krimpen’s mental make-up, for a subtitle for an article on van Krimpen could well be: ‛From Angry Young Man to Angry Old Man’. This anger can be easily explained if one takes into consideration how circumstances in the trade developed during his lifetime.

De Roos and van Krimpen came to the front in the battle against the gradual decline and loss of taste in typography at the turn of the century, of which the younger typographers of this epoch have but a very faint idea. It is worth while to inspect the best books made at that time of which some of our old publishing firms have kept quite a collection; it makes one realize how far even these attempts at perfection are below the level of our run-of-the-mill productions today.

The tragedy of de Roos and van Krimpen is that after the second world war—perhaps in the nostalgic atmosphere of a shrinking empire—England set the fashion in admiring and making pastiches of Victorian tastelessness. This fashion was taken over in a humourless and watered-down form in the Netherlands. Thus both de Roos and van Krimpen lived to see the things they had fought against, each with his own weapons, held up as models of virtue.

De Roos has special artistic abilities which gave him the opportunity to retire into his own world where he worked as happily as an old gardener in a walled-in vineyard. But the steadfast character of van Krimpen, coupled with his focalized talent, made it impossible for him to accept with wise resignation things he despised. He would always retaliate if he had the feeling that book typography was harmed in any way. For he was—and this is often forgotten by those who opposed him—a specialist with all the inhibitions of specialization.

No typography outside the typography of the book existed for him, and all the busy doings of advertising, sales-promotion and the like, he abhorred, like the people and jargon connected with them. Unforgiving he stood in the breach for what he thought to be right. Lonely because of his unrelenting criticism of situations and persons, harsh and unforgiving, knowing that his realm was isolated.

Working drawing by Jan van Krimpen for an engraved commemorative glass.

No doubt the young van Krimpen was formed by the circle of young poets and literary critics to one of whom he was related by marriage. His mind whetted by their brilliance, his enormous powers of perception and absorption stood him in good stead. His thirst for knowledge and keen judgement in matters of taste stayed with him to the end like the capacity to enjoy the other good things of life.

The distinction of van Krimpen’s work is best seen among specimens of the same character. A portrait by Hilliard or Oliver is not seen to advantage in the company of Van Goghs and Rouaults.

The epicurian and the sybarite in van Krimpen are mirrored in his typography. The mathematician’s order and elegant precision are manifested in his type designs. There are countless examples of types used in a better way by others than by the designers themselves. But nobody has, as yet, used his types to better purpose than van Krimpen himself. This is not surprising after all, because, notwithstanding the fact that van Krimpen was a great propagandist of ‛invisible’ typography, his type designs are so very much his own, so personal that they are seen at their best when they are used by their creator. He was a designer for designers, as there are painters for painters, admired by their brother artists but less known among the interested public.

It is hardly possible for a contemporary to judge the greatness of one man compared with those that surround him. Those considered gods in their time are later forgotten, and the really great loom slowly from the murk of time to take their place. Van Krimpen’s true eminence will be judged by future generations. To those who can only look back a little way he seems an important figure, not only because of the example he set, but also because of his relentless persecution of everything slipshod or illogical.

Van Krimpen died with sword and whip in hand, proud and lonely in his own world.

S.L. Hartz