With multiple copies, you know that, somewhere, something will survive. He called it “the greatest invention since the invention of man.” Jews thought printing would protect their traditions from oblivion, from events like the 1240 Disputation of Paris, during which copies of the Talmud were burned in public. There was a marvelous mathematician and philosopher named David Gans who actually wrote a blessing for the printing press.
Jews embraced printing as if it was a gift from God. How do you explain that outpouring of Jewish creativity at the time? I fell in love with a lot of those 16th-century Jewish books, so my goal in making Jewish publications was bringing back some of that sheer quality of elegance and organization. That was a design problem of epic proportions. For example, the first printers of the Talmud created the current form, in which you have the Mishnah in the center with the Gemara and the rabbinic commentaries all surrounding it on the same page. It was truly a golden age no books after were ever as good. Hebrew printing got underway as a big-time effort during the 1520s, in Venice. And gradually, it became my chief work.Ī lot of the fonts you’ve created for Judaica projects are based on historical fonts from the advent of printing. My music friends thought I had gone nuts, but they liked what I was making. Little by little I started designing record jackets and doing a lot of publicity for music organizations. I turned my dining room into a letterpress shop I even had a crane bring a Vandercook press through the window. I started buying up old letterpress equipment and metal types that were being sold for scrap metal prices back then, because people were gradually making everything electronic. My early life was spent in music, and after college I moved to Boston to perform. He took me to visit printing presses, as a teenager I learned letterpress printing in a little print shop at my high school that had been abandoned. My father was a business writer, and while I had very little interest in the stuff he wrote about I had a great interest in how the magazines he wrote for were actually made.
Typography isn’t exactly a typical career path. I thought they were important.Ī page from Kosofsky’s updated High Holiday prayer book for New York City’s Central Synagogue, which shows essential workers biking past the empty temple. But then I thought, “What if I get sick and die, and I wouldn’t be able to make these types?” So I started in early April and I went crazy working on them. When the virus came and everyone was shut in, I lost track of what was Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, like we all did. I’ve been thinking about this type for several years. Scott-Martin Kosofsky: It was a compulsion. Irene Katz Connelly: What was it about a global pandemic that made you want to dive into a time-intensive typesetting project? The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Kosofsky took a break from tending his alpacas to speak with me about what it takes to convert a historic font and why it’s important that modern Judaic books nod to our storied typographic history. His passion project is part of a larger quest to revive Ashkenazi fonts, the edgy, gothic cousins to the sleek Sephardic styles that have historically dominated Hebrew printing and are prevalent in Israel today.
We will endeavour to investigate your request and take the appropriate action ASAP.For years, Kosofsky had been fascinated with the masterful work originating from the Prague printing house of Gershom ben Solomon haKohen, a Jewish publisher known for creating types based on the handwritten Ashkenazi manuscripts of Western and Central Europe. If you find any font on EagleFonts for which you are the copyright holder, under the conditions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act you may submit a Take-down Request by clicking the red flag beside the font name on the font's detailed view page. All fonts can be found elsewhere on the Internet, either as individual fonts or as complete font sets and are believed to be in the public domain. Hieroglyphics Fonts & Ancient Language FontsĪll fonts on the EagleFonts site remain copyright of their respective owners.Abkhaz - Adyghe - Kabardian - Kazakh Fonts.
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