glossário tipográfico: Manfred Klein

20/04/2007

Manfred Klein

the interview

1) The early years
2) Günter Gerhard Lange
3) Klein's Fonteria
4) Family and philosophy

Manfred, when and where did you become a typesetter and what attracted you to typography?
In 1947, two years after the war, I was 15 and hadn’t returned to junior high school. A teacher recommended that I graduate in four years in a special course offered in Berlin. I had been playing with rubber stamp single letters for years; I was a bookworm and I didn’t want to learn bureaucracy in the Berliner ‘Red town hall’. I was driven to the typesetter's apprenticeship more intuitively than based on information, because there was nobody who was able to teach me anything about it.So I applied to the ‘Kurier’, the news mag for the French occupation forces with a printing office (German company + branch of the Imprimerie National where the printed material for the French army in Germany was made).Type design was taught in the technical school, e.g. documents and job printing, also books. By the way, typesetters historically enjoyed a privilege of higher education: they were allowed to carry a sword, a sort of dagger. [Ler mais...]