Pictorial cloth-textured portfolio, 9 x 6 inches, containing 22 loose half-sheet specimens and one full-sheet specimen, printed primarily in black on cream stock. Published circa 1915 in Germany, by Carl Weddigen Graphische Kunstanstalt. Scarce printer's specimen portfolio demonstrating the commercial graphic work of Carl Weddigen's Barmen printing establishment. The elaborate letterheads reproduce commissions for German manufacturers, engineering works, textile concerns, tobacco companies, shipping firms and other businesses, combining virtuoso typography with trademarks, medals, heraldic devices and finely rendered bird's-eye views of factories and industrial complexes. Particularly evocative of German corporate identity immediately before the ascendancy of modernist commercial graphics: industrial architecture itself becomes an emblem of prosperity, scale and technological progress. The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek records a related Weddigen Musterbuch of commercial forms in the German Museum of Books and Writing, Leipzig. Light bumping and rubbing to portfolio. Minor bumping and soiling to a few sheets, otherwise pristine. An unusually substantial survival of early twentieth-century German printing, industrial imagery and commercial graphic design.
Pictorial cloth-textured portfolio, 9 x 6 inches, containing 22 loose half-sheet specimens and one full-sheet specimen, printed primarily in black on cream stock. Published circa 1915 in Germany, by Carl Weddigen Graphische Kunstanstalt. Scarce printer's specimen portfolio demonstrating the commercial graphic work of Carl Weddigen's Barmen printing establishment. The elaborate letterheads reproduce commissions for German manufacturers, engineering works, textile concerns, tobacco companies, shipping firms and other businesses, combining virtuoso typography with trademarks, medals, heraldic devices and finely rendered bird's-eye views of factories and industrial complexes. Particularly evocative of German corporate identity immediately before the ascendancy of modernist commercial graphics: industrial architecture itself becomes an emblem of prosperity, scale and technological progress. The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek records a related Weddigen Musterbuch of commercial forms in the German Museum of Books and Writing, Leipzig. Light bumping and rubbing to portfolio. Minor bumping and soiling to a few sheets, otherwise pristine. An unusually substantial survival of early twentieth-century German printing, industrial imagery and commercial graphic design.
