Classica Pro by Bernd Möllenstädt A real alternative for letterpress printing A masterpiece

It was only after many years, shortly before the end of his life, Bernd Möllenstädt brought out these early drafts of his Classica Light and Light Italic from his drawer, and asked me to produce for him on the computer a Bold and Bold Italic, from which we later wanted to interpolate further cuts like Regular and so on.

The boldening of letters with an oblique axis and with hairlines which should not grow to the same extent as the general line widths, is hard to cope with perfectly, even for the smartest computer program, and even more so, when it concerns an as complicated set of data as those conceived by Bernd. The automatically generated result could therefore only be a first step that had to be improved manually later. This was about the stage that we had reached when Bernd died in March 2013, leaving me behind with comprehensive corrections on proofs of this automatically generated Bold. Although I was aware that it would mean a lot of work to complete the project, I did not want to leave it unfinished and decided to finalize and publish the Classica, also in Bernd‘s honor. In the course of the two years that I worked on this font family it somewhat naturally became also my own. New details were added and some of the existing changed. A book typeface requires the supreme and forgives rarely, it represents a true masterpiece. My intention and my ambition were to create a real alternative for letterpress printing, with a font family that contains all the typographic options for an excellent typesetting, and is better readable and has a better appearance than other existing typefaces. Whether this was achieved, the reader may decide.

Volker Schnebel, Hamburg, december 2014