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This typeface is used for headers in a machzor (Jewish prayerbook for the high holidays) in Stockholm. The print year is 1961, but I would guess it is a reprint from the early 30's.

Notice the high crossbar F and B.

I have tried the regular automated search services, but come up empty.

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  • Automated font ID sites don't really work well when the image quality is as bad as this. Perhaps invest in a scanner.
    – Billy Kerr
    Sep 21, 2020 at 12:28

2 Answers 2

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+50

Kleukens-Antiqua is the font in your photo. Elsner+Flake have a digitization with italic but it is maybe lighter than this metal type printing looks. This digitization by Christine Gertsch seems very good but it may not include an italic. Another without italic is by Nick's Fonts. ITC Benguiat might be the best choice if you like this style but aren't attached to this specific typeface, the condensed italic styles aren't well known and look pretty similar to this. The font's designer, FW Kleukens, cut numerous other typefaces so a good route to finding something you like could be to look at them, often a good path to combining typefaces is to choose two from the same designer.

Sincere apologies with regard to the delay in considering your interesting question!

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    I appreciate you took the time to return to this question! Now, how different is the italic from a simple sloping of the roman. That is, lacking a proper italic, will it look okay slanting what I have?
    – simon
    Sep 21, 2020 at 8:37
  • Don't really know, you'd have to try it and see. Looks pretty similar, but you might find squashing it a bit gets the narrower feeling of an italic. Failing that you could start with Trieste EF and add some fake bold, or use ITC Benguiat which also has a sloped roman.
    – Copilot
    Sep 21, 2020 at 10:16
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I haven't got time to really look into this, but it's likely an old metal type if from 1961, before phototype took over general printing, and my impression is printing in Sweden at that time was a bit dominated by German imports. So you probably want to look through the Klingspor Museum's scan of the 1928 Handbuch der Schriftarten, an index of German typefaces available in the 1920s, and the supplements, and the 1948 Das Buch des Setzers. It's a "sloped roman" type–an "italic" where the 'a' and 'f' are just the upright forms sloped, which was also quite common with German "Künstlerschrift" artistic typefaces in the early 20th century.

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