Peter Schnorr was a German artist/illustrator of Art Nouveau period (called Jugendstil in Germany and Austria). He was quite adept at calligraphy and did a variety of commercial work, including business signs. He designed at least four different alphabets and collaborated with Bruce Rogers on advertising work and title page designs for books. One of their clients was the publishing house of Houghton Mifflin.

I have not been able to discover anything else about him, but I suspect he might be the grandson of the Bavarian artist Jules Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who was once commissioned to do a mural by Ludwig I of Bavaria (whose famous castle was copied by Disneyland). Please email me with any additional biographical data (and please identify source of information).

Schnorr did not give individual names to his fonts. Where there is no historical name, we like to follow the tradition initiated by Bauer and name fonts after their designer, with a descriptive adjective in the designer’s native language. Gestreckt is German for stretched or elongated.

An interesting deign detail of this typeface is the cross bar of the “T” --it is NOT symetrical. The right hand side extends only 88% as far as the left hand side (a ratio of 9:8). I presume this was done for a more pleasing letter fit. Today Schnorr’s design is frequently offered under the name “Ambrosia.” However. close inspection will usually reveal that the serifs have been treated differently. I believe our font has a greater fidelity to the original design. Please also compare the design of the various auxiliary characters to those in other fonts. Often they are either borrowed from an inappropriate font of a different period or are missing altogether. We make every effort to design characters that are in keeping with the overall design and spirit of the typeface. For example, see the superscript Registered Trademark symbol (0174) and the Double s (0223). I think both are quite successful.

Schnorr Gestreckt ML represents a major extension of the original release. In addition to the standard 1252 Western Europe Code Page with character slots up to decimal position 255, there are glyphs for the 1250 Central Europe, the 1252 Turkish and the 1257 Baltic Code Pages. There are also two alternate letter forms, one ornament and seven ligatures with Unicode codepoints (Private Use Area) and OpenType aalt, ornm & liga GSUB layout features. There are a total of 318 glyphs and 351 kerning pairs. Please note that some older applications may only be able to access the Western Europe character set (approximately 221 glyphs). This release also incorporates a redesign of several glyphs: the comma, quotes, acute accent, and grave accent.