“Well, I want the Christmas card” 🎄🎅✉️
Elizabeth Friedlander (1903–1984) made a typeface, disinformation campaigns, Die Dame fashion magazine layouts, decorative paper patterns for Curwen, book covers for publishers like Penguin and Mills & Boon, plus played the violin.
Born in Germany, she studied with typography and calligraphy with Emil Rudolf Weiss (former student of Anna Simons) who likely introduced her to Bauer foundry director Georg Hartmann. Bauer commissioned her eponymous typeface Elizabeth in 1927; it was released in 1937.
Friedlander worked as graphic designer, moving twice when anti-Semitic laws made legally working in Germany, then Italy, impossible. Sponsored as a domestic servant in 1939, she went to London. She met Francis Meynell and worked for England’s “black propaganda” unit, forging documents against the Nazis. She stayed in the UK after WWII, then moved Ireland in the 1960s.
Graham published an incredible book about Friedlander “full of things.” Besides Friedlander, we cover how letterpress printing works, freelancer life, and where curiosity about paper leads.
Special guest: Graham Moss, printer at Incline Press (Oldham, England), publisher of Paucker’s New Borders, fan of Manchester's history and his press in action.
In 2025, Graham and Helen Moss moved to Scotland, planning to make a letterpress workshop with teaching and gallery space. Follow a traditional private press’s new iteration via Awen Press.
PSA: Support the endangered craft of letterpress printing and small presses.
📚
- Pauline Paucker, New Borders: The Working Life of Elizabeth Friedlander (Incline Press, 1998). Curwen papers start pg.85
- María Ramos, Review of New Borders, Alphabettes (2022)
- Elizabeth Friedlander Collection, University College Cork, Ireland
- Billie Muraben, “Elizabeth Friedlander: one of the first women to design a typeface,” It’s Nice That (2018)
- Katharine Meynell, “Elizabeth” (film, 2018)
- Elizabeth type: Fonts in Use, Klingspor
- Swamp Press, Friedlander initials
Credits
Creator and Producer: Bethany Qualls
Editor: Joe DeGrand
Original episode artwork: Trifoxatops aka Jenna Mauro
Social Media Whisperer: Elizabeth Giardina
Music: "Sneaky Feet" by geoffharvey
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