can we have a close-up please?

This is another interesting thing. They used to have trendy Art Nouveau/Jugend versions of the grotesks. Switch those characters and the typeface turns into "Botha". Sample from the next spread:

Schelter & Giesecke went further with "Columbus":

Those Swiss boys must have shaken their heads.

Standard

My Standard "specimen no 539 A" reads "made in Germany by Berthold type foundry... Imported and distributed by Amsterdam continental types and graphic equipment inc." I Can't find the year of printing, which is a common problem with type specimens. I believe its from the fifties.

Timo

Gerstner program was released by Berthold for Diatype, I guess in 1957 after Univers, Before Helvetica...
It certainly wasn't. Diatype was still being developed then. The first usable machines came onto the market in 1961. Gerstner Programm was designed in 1967.

Where these stamps came from? Berthold? Linotype?
These are obviously rubber stamps, set into a composing stick-type-of-device after the individual letters had been stamped onto the ink pad. The whole stick with the rubber letters inside it was then turned around and pressed onto paper or any other material. The sample says "Lettering for windows, displays, exhibitions, shops".

There was another material, called Plakadur, Plakat being the German word for poster. It was a wood/plastic composite that Berthold made its larger "wood" type from. They had a beautiful, fairly light cut of Akzidenz Grotesk Medium which was used for showcard printing machines. They were produced by a small company and sold to department stores for printing large labels, showcards, price cards. Essentially, you placed the type into the bed of the machine, inked it, put the paper on top of the type and ran a pressure roller over it, like a small proofing press. Apart from AG Medium, the had other Berthold faces, e.g. Herold, Block Condensed and Fanfare (by Louis Oppenheim, the Lo-Schrift – now LoType – designer).

"It was released in the U.S., I believe by ATF, as Standard"

Sorry for my geezer brain fart error before. It was Univers I was thinking of that was released by ATF, not Standard as I mistakenly said before. I still have visions of those large green cards with all the weight specimens :-/

ChrisL

does anybody has ANY idea where i can get a set of those? or places where i could search? or even just if there was a special name for them?

As I wrote earlier, they were rubber stamps or made from a composite material, sold under various trade names. One company in Germany was called Neoprint by Gröner GmbH. They made sets in Plakadur and rubber, but i haven't seen them used since the 1980s. They're not made anymore, but – like everything else – probably available on eBay et al.

couldnt find “neoprint” on german ebay though.

Gröner GmbH still exist. Just do a search with that and Neopring on Google – i saw a few rubber stamp sets for sale.

At the moment this seller sells 5 neoprint sets.
http://search.ebay.de/_W0QQsassZfranca2QQhtZ-1

--astype.de--

Thanks for the keywords and correcting me Erik.

In the book Visual language Gerstner doesn't mention Helvetica, but Univers as influence so I thought it was from those times.

Gerstner writes:
"Berthold marketed the new old Akzidenz-Grotesk as Gerstner Program - in photolithography; in other words, on the very first photolitography machine called Diatype. This cumbersome piece of equipment was soon replaced by a better one. And with that, the Gerstner Program disappeared from the market."

David Thometz offered some insights in this other thread: http://www.typophile.com/forums/messages/30/722.html

i found the following spread in an undated bauer specimen book. ("Hauptprobe: unsere Schriftgiesserei- und Messing-Erzeugnisse: Fabriken in Stuttgart, Berlin SW, Wien, St. Petersburg und Moskau / Bauer & Co., Stuttgart"). at the bottom left it reads "To highlight passages you can use Accidenz-Grotesk on the right side (Page 353). Both typefaces have "the same line"". yes, they say "have the same line".

the cover of the book is Bauer only (a great embossement), but inside there is the H. Berthold AG note on the bottom of every page. whats the ca. date of this? the library couldnt date it.

you can find the full spread here. i cannot garantuee how long this will stay online, so download it if you want to have it.

its a photo of a photocopy, so dont expect too great things.

Scroll down this thread for James Mosley's posted image of an 1850s German sans serif, with lower case:

http://www.typophile.com/node/46184

This thread and a few others were amazing until about a half hour ago. I was writing a paper on Akzidenz Grotesk myself, and all this conflicting history was blowing my mind, it was like reading a mystery novel about a font. Unfortunately, my professor told me another student chose the same font as me, and I have been reassigned.

It's not all bad though. I might be a few days behind on the project but I got reassigned FF Meta.