Schelter & Giesecke Type Foundry


J.G. Schelter & Giesecke was a German type foundry and manufacturer of printing presses started 1819 in Leipzig by punchcutter Johann Schelter and typefounder Christian Giesecke. The foundry was nationalized in 1946 by the new German Democratic Republic, forming Typoart, Dresden.

Typefaces

These foundry types were produced by Schelter & Giesecke:
competition of 1965 in Breite halbfette Grotesk.
Schelter & Giesecke's Breite halbfette Grotesk was popular in trade and advertising printing in the mid-twentieth century, and was used by both Bauhaus-movement printers and Swiss-style designers of the mid-century. Christian Schwartz's FF Bau is a loose digitisation.
The foundry claimed by the twentieth century to have been one of the first to offer general-purpose sans-serif typefaces with lower-case, as early as 1825. This was repeated by some authors, but is now known to be untrue: Wolfgang Homola dates it to 1882 based on a study of Schelter & Giesecke specimens.

Press Manufacturing

Beginning in 1827 Schelter & Giesecke manufactured letterpress presses, cylinder proof presses and platen presses; and after World War I also of web-fed, letterpress and flexo printing presses.
The Leipzig house of foundry co-owner Georg Giesecke, designed by Berlin architect Max Hasak, survives and is listed.