The Many Lives of Elizabeth Friedlander

“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

Transcript

Re(un)Covered Podcast

Season 1, Episode 3: The many lives of Elizabeth Friedlander

Release date: 29 October 2025

Copyright © 2025. All rights reserved. This text may not be published online or distributed without written permission. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

[intro music] 

Joe
 Welcome to reuncovered! The podcast about what lingers in the archive and why it matters. Episode three: The many lives of Elizabeth Friedlander.
  

Recorded voice
 The linotype machine sets solid lines of type called hot type, creating that powerful element of communication: the printed word.
 
 Joe
 Word. Hello, Bethany.
 
 Bethany
 Hi, Joe.
 
 Joe
 What are we re uncovering? What is uncovered and what can we're uncover?
 
 Bethany
 It sounds like upholstery. Sometimes when I think about it.
 
 Joe
 Welcome to re uncovered, the upholstery show.
 
 Bethany
 Someday we'll do an episode about archival upholstery and it’ll be the perfect Venn. And I'm so excited about it. Yeah.
 
 Joe

Yes.
 
 Bethany
 Today this is episode three, the many lives of Elizabeth Friedlander.
 
 Joe
 Yes.
 
 Bethany
 Elizabeth Friedlander is part of our cadre of women type designers because she designed a typeface, but she also did like 18 other million things. Okay, that's not the precise number.
 
 Joe
 Okay. I was going to fact check you. I was going to say, yeah, how do we know it's 18 million?
 
 Bethany
 It might have been 17.5 million.
 
 Joe
 Unclear. You know. Yeah. Citation needed.
 
 Bethany
 Yeah. And she's someone who we actually know a fair amount about. Unlike, again, the norm of this fine podcast. 

Yes. Yeah. So that's who that's who we're re uncovering today.
 
 Joe
 So talk to me about Elizabeth Friedlander. What's her deal, what's she got going on?
 
 Bethany
 So Elizabeth Friedlander worked as a type designer, a book designer, a graphic designer. She was a calligrapher. She even worked for England's Ministry of Information in the Black propaganda unit during World War two.
 
 Joe
 Whoa. Yeah, it's a very serious title.
 
 Bethany
 So she was born in October, 1903 to German Jewish parents, and she grew up in Berlin, Charlottenburg in Germany. And she went to the Berlin Arts Academy and studied typography and calligraphy with Emil Rudolf Weiss. And here I made this connection, actually talking to Graham, our guest for this episode. But Weiss, who she studies with, studied with Anna Simons from episode one.
 
 Joe
 Oh no way.
 
 Bethany
 Yeah. And so what's really cool is so Weiss studied with Anna Simons, but actually not very much time wise, but he like really credits her as a teacher, as an influence of his and like writes articles about it and like is very prolific and like a effusive I would say. And so he then is teaching Friedlander. So like we have this really lovely, like the chain of influence again, like when I said, Anna Simons taught a generation or two of typography like, I was not joking.
 
 Joe
 There you go.
 
 Bethany
 So that's very cool. So he worked for Bauer Type Foundry, which is one of the big players in, you know, the early 20th century German type industry and likely introduced her to Georg Hartmann, who was the founding director. We don't know this necessarily for sure, but so in like the 1920s, she's working for the Ullstein publishing house, which has this De Dama Lady magazine, and she does layouts and article headings and like hand lettering for them.
 
 Joe
 They had a magazine called Lady Magazine.
 
 Bethany
 Yeah.
 
 Joe
 That's pretty sick.
 
 Bethany
 It's kind of like Elle, right?
 
 Joe
 Yeah, I guess she magazine.
 
 Bethany
 But this is this woman's magazine, and she's working there from like 1928 to 1934 ish. So Elisabeth Friedlander is working in Germany. Bauer commissions her to make the typeface. Elisabeth, which should have been named Friedlander because normally typeface to name for people's last names. However, her last name is very Jewish and in the 30s, when that was going to be released, that wasn't so great because the Nazis were kind of against that.
 
 Bethany
 So Hartmann was like, why don't we call it Elisabeth? Because then I can sell it and you can like, do stuff and then it'll be cool. Oof, yeah. So like basically in the mid 1930s, the new anti-Semitic laws in Germany made it illegal for her to work. And so she moved to Italy in October 1936, which sadly isn't going to work out.
 
 Joe
 Yeah, I was going to say, Elisabeth, that is not going to help you.
 
 Bethany
 So she lives in Milan. She works for a couple of different publishers. She does book jackets, she does marketing materials. But then in late 1938, there are new Italian anti-Semitic laws, which means she can't work. And so she tried to get to the US and couldn’t. And so she actually gets sponsored by a family and moves to England and is a domestic servant for this Quaker family that sponsors her.
 
 Bethany
 And like she doesn't speak English either. So she like, learns English, is in England, it's World War Two. And then she meets Francis Meynell, who is working at a really like key design agency, and he gets her a job with this black propaganda unit where they basically forge Nazi documents and like, ration books and did disinformation campaigns and like, made stuff. And so it's like four people and she's like, working in this like, crack team of like designers who also speak German and like are pro getting rid of Nazis.
 
 Joe
 So they were looking for people who are in the design space and can create official German looking stuff as kind of counter propaganda to sow dissent or something, or.
 
 Bethany
 Yeah. And I think it also might be, I don't know the details deeply, but I do think there's also a like, you know, that way we can give our spies stuff that look real so that if they get caught behind enemy lines. But I don't know that for sure now. I'm just saying that.
 
 Joe
 Yeah. Now we're just spitballing.
 
 Bethany
 Now we're just spitballing. World War two ends, Friedlander decides to stay in the UK, and so she works for a bunch of different publishers. She's a freelancer, and so she just freelances the rest of her career. She works for places like Penguin and Mills and Boon, which is a big Regency and big romance publisher in England. She designs a logo and calligraphy for Penguin for the 25th anniversary.
 
 Bethany
 She does book covers. She also works for Curwen, which was a company that did these patterned papers that are like, pretty special and really beautiful. And she makes decorative borders for Linotype. She does printers, flowers and other like ornaments for monotype. She illustrates maps she like, does calligraphy for the Sandhurst Military Academy.
 
 Joe
 She does it all.
 
 Bethany
 She just like she really is this woman of like 8000 things. And in the 1960s, she moves to County Cork, Ireland, to Kinsale, with her lifelong companion, Alessandro MacMahon, who they were, you know, live next to each other and were like together, but, you know, never got married or anything. She continues to design stuff. And she died there in 1984.
 
 Bethany
 And something I learned doing research for this episode, she also was like a crack violinist. And so she donated her violin to the town. And so now, like the most promising high school violinist like, gets that violin for a year, which is, like, really cool.
 
 Joe
 It's very sweet. It's very it's a very cool. Like, I see her archive.
 
 Bethany
 She gave it to a friend who was married to someone who had been the mayor of Cork and that archive then eventually ends up as the Elizabeth Friedlander Collection at University College Cork. So if you want to know more about her process work or her notebooks or anything like that, that is there.
 
 Joe
 And so who are we talking with today about the many lives of Elizabeth Friedlander.
 
 Bethany
 Today we're talking with Graham Moss, who runs Incline Press, which is the press that created the, I would say, best, and he would say only, book about Elizabeth Friedlander called New Borders, written by Pauline Paucker. And it is this beautiful... It's beautiful. It's a book that looks at her life. It also includes a ton of realia.
 
 Bethany
 So this is.
 
 Joe
 Is that her?
 
 Bethany
 Yeah. This is like a, a portrait. I think she did it for herself.
 
 Joe
 Wow. That's amazing.
 
 Bethany
 This will be in the show notes, but the University of Victoria, did this really beautiful, high quality scan of this book because it was printed in a very limited edition in 1998. And Graham and Pauline are both thrilled that it is accessible to the world, and it's freely available online. And one of the things that's really cool about it, and we talk more about why this is this way in our conversation, is he wanted it to be a book filled with things as opposed to filled with pictures.
 
 Joe
 I was wondering, I was like, it looks like these are, you know, actual photos and prints like inserted into a book.
 
 Bethany
 They are.
 
 Joe
 Is that what I'm looking at?
 
 Bethany
 That is what you're looking at there, tipped in. Oh. Which means that you have to like, go in hand paste stuff in.
 
 Joe
 Oh my gosh.
 
 Bethany
 And so this right here here's a type specimen of Elizabeth Antiqua. And so her typeface we have Elizabeth Antiqua and Elizabeth Cursive. So it's a Roman normal serif font. And then as a script version of it.
 
 Joe
 And wow I love all these wiggly little letters. That W is wild.
 
 Bethany
 Right? It's so cool.
 
 Joe
 Is this something that she designed?
 
 Bethany
 And so like, this is a water like a cover of a magazine in Italy that she designed, like, this is the, and then these are really cool. And so you're going to like, these lot.
 
 Joe
 Whoa. What am I looking at?
 
 Bethany
 So these are basically drafts of some of the patterns she made when she made these patterned papers. And also for, like, logo work and stuff.
 
 Joe
 So this is a series of her sketches of what the logos could be like and, and where it's intersecting and looks like the New York Yankees logo or a very scripted, loopy version of that. Yeah. That's lovely.
 
 Bethany
 And so it's it's like, this is this is a piece of what in the archive we call process work, which is like the stuff that leads to the final product. Right. So yes. And like this here for these patterned papers, she did this is like here are some because they're I think they're litho printed. So it's printed with different colored inks on top of each other.
 
 Bethany
 So like she's these are like watercolors in part because then you can experiment with like, well, if I overlay blue ink all over all of this wash, what will it look like.
 
 Joe
 I see here?
 
 Bethany
 And so that's like a pretty cool and then these are actual samples of some of the pattern paper she designs. Wow. From the period. Like these are like mid century pieces of paper.
 
 Joe
 And these are so beautiful. They're like the most beautiful tiling kind of decorations.
 
 Bethany
 Right. Because you're like patterned paper whatever. And then it's like now this is gorgeous.
 
 Joe
 Like it's kind of hypnotic honestly. Yeah.
 
 Bethany
 So we'll have links in the show notes, so you can go and it's like super high res and just really it's really lovely.
 
 Joe
 Yeah. These are.
 
 Bethany
 Beautiful. And like, the whole book is hand printed. It's hand bound, it’s all just really lovely. It's just lovely. So he makes the new borders book with Pauline Paucker is published in 1998 and then in 2018 it is the anniversary, the 80th anniversary of Elizabeth Friedlander’s typeface, Elizabeth being released by Bauer because she designed it in the 20s.
 
 Bethany
 But it wasn't released until the 30s. There was like a ten year gap. And so he made this, which I'm showing you now, like a keepsake, like celebration, celebration book about Elizabeth Friedlander. And what's very cool is in the time between making the new borders like sort of comprehensive biography and designs and all that stuff, he had acquired Elizabeth typeface.
 
 Bethany
 And so he was able to print this with Elizabeth typeface, and they also went and found there's like a letter she made, they made a typeface based on those and got them cast and so. Oh there's Friedlander initials which she like designed in the 40s but never was released as a typeface. It was like decorative initials for oh.
 
 Joe
 My gosh.
 
 Bethany
 I thing. And so like now that exists. So today, Joe, we're talking with Graham who is the printer and basically all things, as far as I can tell, at Incline press. And they published two books about Elizabeth Friedlander, one of which is sort of, I would call it the best, he says. It's the only (potato, potato) work called New Borders The Working Life of Elizabeth Friedlander, written by Pauline Packer.

And, we get into more about freelancers working life, how he found out about her, and also talk about the art of letter press printing, which is what you use movable type to make. And so we're going to kind of get both product and process together. And it's really lovely. I think you're going to have a really good time with it.
 
 Joe
 Lovely. That's cool. A one stop shop.
 
 Graham
 So I had a job in the 1960s working as the office manager for an anarchist printing company, and they had their own huge printing press, and they used to start work at 6:00 in the morning, thereabouts, a bit later in the winter, and I would go down there before my guys work started. And really, that's where I learned how to do letterpress printing and got some sense of a history of letter press printing.
 
 Graham
 So from then, which is about 1963 64 until about 1989, I ended up in 1989 as a schoolteacher teacher. Okay. And I was I was disgruntled by the attitude of the government towards telling teachers what they should teach. So I decided to look around for something else to do. I taught myself bookbinding, and then I remembered about letter press printing.
 
 Graham
 So I just I went and bought a small tabletop printing press, and as soon as I smelled the ink and pull the lever down, I remembered all about it. Wow. So I took up, but well, printing as well. So for two semesters I taught. I was head of the history department so I could negotiate my own contract. So I worked three days a week for two semesters, and then I retired from teaching and started printing and binding instead.
 
 Bethany
 I'm so shocked that Thatcher era politics was not great for teachers.
 
 Graham
 That's no, no. What a surprise.
 
 Bethany
 So weird. Yeah, I know some people listening understand how letter press works, have done letter press, but many of our listeners have never even thought about type design or like how type works before. So could you just give like a medium length description of the process of like letter press, like how it works using the hand type that you're doing.
 
 Graham
 The job of the typographer is, first of all, to select a typeface that they think for whatever reason. And there are a whole variety of different reasons suits the job. Right? So you make that choice and that's a design choice. But then you've got the mechanics of the whole thing. I mean, there are certain given things that have to be understood.
 
 First of all, the all type is exactly the same height. And there are no tolerances. There are no tolerances. Type is .918 of an inch. I. And if it's 920 of an inch high, then that letter won't print or make a hole in the paper actually. And all the other letters won’t print so well. And if a letter is 0.916 and it won't print if it's next to a letter, that's .918.
 
 Graham
 So every letter has got to be exactly the same. And the mechanics are simply that you have to have every line the same length, just as every letter has to be the same height. So you have a gauge called a type stick that you put your typing letter by letter until you filled up the type stick. And if the type stick isn't filled up, then when you try to pick up the line of sight, they will just drop out.
 
 Graham
 Yeah, they won't stay in place, so it has to be tight. So there are again no tolerances at all. You put all the lines together and they make a page that page is then locked into a metal frame called a chase. And that chase is then picked up. This is why every line has got to be the same length.
 
 Graham
 Because if when you go to pick it up, they're not the same length, the lines are loose will fall out. Okay. And when they fall on the floor, we call it a pie. Pie of type is a pile of silverfish on the floor. So then you put that metal chase into your printing press, the rollers come down, or you can do it by hand if you've got the right sort of press for the job.
 
 Graham
 And they put ink on the type. And because every piece of type is exactly the same height, the ink will go evenly on all of the letters. Then you've got to put your piece of paper in between what's pressing against the type so that the ink, instead of going on the wall. We call it the platen. Instead, the ink goes on the paper.
 
 Now, what I've not talked about is the design of the page, the layout of the page, the size of the margins, where the margins are, how much space you use for between paragraphs. If you use any space strip, all of that is very complicated and they're design decisions and all. I've talked about is the typographic decisions that are concerned with the mechanics of printing.
 
 Bethany
 And you and you have the the spacers, the spacer bars that keep stuff in. Right. Also that don't that don't have a well.
 
 Graham
 We call it furniture. And it's locked into the case with a mechanical device that really is just a wedge, but it's a mechanical wedge rather than a piece of wood, which is how the ideas started. And they're called quoins spelt with a, q, u, and the only other people use quoins are architects. And it's the wedge that goes at the center of a bridge or the top of the arch of a window.
 
 Graham
 They call that a quoin as well.
 
 Bethany
 And when you're printing, the press has to rethink before every page. Right?
 
 Graham
 Yes. So the role is mechanical for my on my machines it's all mechanical. The rollers go up and down and they collect fresh ink at the top all the time, and then put it down over onto the type.
 
 Bethany
 So how do you find your typefaces or your fonts?
 
 Graham
 Well okay. Font is a word that's been stolen by the computer industry to describe what we call a typeface. I still use the old language because when I started printing, that's the language I learned. And because I didn't do any printing in that 25 year interim period, I never learned the new language. I've never worked with computer typesetting.
 
 Graham
 I've never worked with a keyboard except for sending people messages. So I haven't had to learn that language. So I don't use computers in my work at all. All of my printing is from metal type, so each individual letter, okay, there are about I think it's 194 different pieces of type in a tray of type. We don't call it a tray of type.
 
 Graham
 We call it a case. And we spell it case, but it's the French word for drawer. Okay. So it goes back to when English printing first began, though all the English printers learned in France or in North Germany. But they use the French language for the for the different parts of the job. Each case of type I have so about 350, 380 cases of type I have a 3-floor building.
 
 Graham
 The basement is a stone floor, so all the type, because of it’s weight, it’s a lead alloy. So all of the types down in the basement, the printing presses are on the ground floor. And I live upstairs. So this is called vertical integration.
 
 Bethany
 Yeah, right. You're so modern I love it. And one of the things that again, because you're working with physical type, like you can't just say I want this to be ten point. You have to have ten point.
 
 Graham
 Yes. You not only have to have it, you have to know what you want to use. So you have to have a mental image of the page before you actually start work. Well, that's how the work starts, really is with all your own mental images of what it is you want to achieve, how you want the page to look.
 
 Graham
 So if if I, for instance, the piece I'm setting at the moment, I'm setting it in 18 point type, which is quite large, I'll have enough for about a page and a half, right? So I have to set a page and a half. I print the first page, then I put the first page away. In other words, I break all the type up and put it back in the case.
 
 Graham
 And then I finish off the second half of the second page so that I can print the second page.
 
 Bethany
 Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
 
 Graham
 But if, if I was, if I had to, I decided to use 12 points, I, I would have had enough time to set the whole book in 12 point time. But that's kind of boring and kind of tedious to sit there in the case, it would take about, oh, probably nine days to set this whole book in type.
 
 Graham
 So doing it this way around. In other words, printing one page, then putting the chip away, then resetting the next page, then printing that page, it breaks the work up and that appeals to me. So that's the way I like to do it. If I need to, I can get typeset for me on a monotype casting machine where that machine puts all the letters in the correct order, but I occasionally I do.
 
 Graham
 I haven't got one now, but I know men who do, so I get it done out of house.
 
 Bethany
 That's awesome. By this point, our fine listeners, know all about Monotype and Linotype because that's sort of what the, the technology that's giving us the time period for this series. So that's very cool. I also that's very cool that they still people can still get you can still get typecast that way.
 
 Graham
 I think in England there are for people who do typecasting. But that's it. That's it. Yeah.
 
 Bethany
 Are people still casting new metal type?
 
 Graham
 Oh gosh. Yes, yes. New designs as well. There's a I've got a lovely new design. I call it new. It's probably 2 or 3 years old now that was designed by Russell Maret in New York called Hungry Dutch. And it's a lovely typeface. And it, it visually it goes back to the 16th century. But with all the smoothness of the letters of the 21st century.

Graham
So, you know, in terms of its design, it looks old fashioned, but in terms of its, applicability, it's bang up to date modern stuff. And it was the last typeface that the Monotype Corporation cut the matrices for.

Bethany
That makes sense to me, especially given all the cool things you've done before. You got to type in the mixture of the mechanical and the artistic. You know, you published New Borders, the Working life of Elizabeth Friedlander back in 1998, which is still like the best, I think, overview of her oeuvre.

Graham
And I'll tell you, it's not the best. There is no other, you know, not now. Nobody else has gone there. And I think that is a mark of how good Pauline Paucker was writing the book in the first place. She covered all the bases. It's a it's a wonderful book. And Pauline writes like an angel. The book reads as if it was a novel. It's absolutely terrific. It really is. I was so lucky in chasing that book and getting it done.

Bethany
So what inspired this project?

Graham
Curwen press was an English, commercial printing house in the 19th. Well, they were Victorian originally, but in the 1920s and 30s they had a lot of new designers in and a new management board and one of the things they did was to produce what we call patterned paper. So it's a decorated paper, like a marbled paper, but instead of it being marbled, it's printed and they're usually printed by offset litho.

Graham
And they employed artists of the day to create different designs. And they started doing this. I think the first one was, a woman called Margaret Calkin James and her path pattern paper came out in about 1921, 22. And around about the same time. They used a lot of designs from an English artist called Claude Lovett Frazer. But by the 1940s they were using artists who are perhaps better known nowadays Graham Sutherland, for instance, Enid Marx was another one.

Graham
Henry Moore, who was more famous as a sculptor, Edward Hoppy, who was more famous as a photographer. But among them all was Elizabeth Friedlander, and she started working for Curwen press as a freelance in about 1947 48. And she designed packages for them that then were, well, they were commissioned by I, for instance, a soap making company, and she designed the wrapping for the soap.

Graham
But she also did these decorated papers. Okay. So we jump now to 1984 five when Curwen Press went bankrupt and the whole business closed down. And my paper merchant in London, a man called John Purcell, was just starting out in business, and he bought up the store of patterned paper from Curwen Press at the auction. So I turn up there, having met some of those, some of the designers, especially Enid Marx, I turned up at John Purcell's, and I see some patterned paper on the stack in the storeroom and I said, is that for sale?

Yes, of course it is. So he sent me a sheet with little snips on it of all the different pattern papers that they had. And I was immediately I really knew next to nothing about them. But I'd been introduced to Enid Marx, so I went to see Enid Marx. It was a woman in Sheffield called Tanya Smaller, who'd worked for Penguin.

Her husband had been one of the designers at Penguin Books. I spoke to her about these decorative papers, and I realized that there were a whole lot of different papers by this person called Elizabeth Friedlander. I had a pal who was the store house keeper for paper at a university in Manchester, and his job was to sell paper to students, and he told me that there was a new mature student in who knew about Elizabeth Friedlander, because I was looking for someone who could write a little introduction about Elizabeth's trade.

And I knew nothing, absolutely nothing. So anyway, I was then introduced to Justin Howe, who turned out to be a typographic historian, and in 1986-87, he and Pauline Paucker had interviewed, German exiles in London in the design world, including potters and sculptors. But one of them was a man called Berthold Wolpe, who is a type designer who designed the typeface Albertus, and another one called Hyperion, which is still reasonably well known.

And Pauline told me that always the last question that they asked any of these survivors was, who else do you recommend that I talk to? And Pauline said she has a lovely way of describing she. She sort of shrugged her shoulders and put on the mannerisms of Berthold Wolpe and said, well, my dear, you should talk to Elizabeth Friedlander. She is so. And he put his fingers to his lips and kissed his fingers and threw his hand into the air. So beautiful, you see. Anyway, it turned out she died the year before, but Pauline then met the close friend of Elizabeth Friedlander, a woman called Sheila Goldberg, and Sheila Goldberg had left everything. She died. She didn't meet Sheila Goldberg.

She met Sheila Goldberg's husband, Gerald, and Gerald Goldberg, who had been the mayor of Cork but inherited everything the Elizabeth Friedlander given to Sheila Goldberg and Pauline was given access to the entire archive with all of Elizabeth Friedlander’s pen and pencil written notes attached to each piece of work. And so that's how I got to meet Pauline. Through Justin, through knowing a chap who sold the paper in the university. And it was all simply because I was interested in decorative paper.

Bethany
I mean, it is a gorgeous book. It also has 80 tipped-in illustrations. Can you describe for the folks at home what tipping in means in bookbinding who haven’t done it before?

Graham
Okay, let's let's start with where it comes from. Okay. Now there are two ways you can illustrate a book. You can illustrate a book by printing on the page, printing the picture on the page. Or you can illustrate the book by printing the picture on another piece of paper, and then gluing that piece of paper onto the page of the book.

Graham
And that's what tipping in is. You are tipping in another image onto the page of the book. Now, why would you do this? That's a serious question. And the answer to that is, I didn't want a book to be full of pictures. I wanted the book to be full of things. Okay, so what I tried to do was just some.

Graham
For instance, she had one exhibition in London in the 1960s, and in her archive was the card that she designed to invite people to her exhibition. So I could have just put a picture of that on the page. But how much nicer to have the card. Yeah. So I printed it on the card and stuck that on the page.

Graham
Okay, so you've got some sense of the real thing. She was working forging German anti-German. Well, aren't you Nazi propaganda in 1941 42, working in London. And there was a little group of four people working together in one office, and she printed their Christmas card. She designed and printed the Christmas card from the four people in the office.

Graham
So what do you want? You know, do you want a picture of the Christmas card or do you want the Christmas card? Well, I want the Christmas card. Yeah. Of course, this comes from the fact that I bought all this patterned paper from John Purcell in London, and I wanted to stick original examples of papers that were printed in 1949 and 1950. I mean, that's how old the stock paper was. And I wanted the real thing on the page, not a picture of the thing.

Bethany
Yeah.

Graham
Okay. So that's what tipped in plates and that's really what it means. And it goes back. I mean, I think of the art books I looked at when I was a kid in, let's say, the 1950s. If they were color printed. The book itself was led to press printed, but often the color printing of a reproduction of a painting would be printed on a separate piece of paper.

Graham
Because it required to get a good reproduction, it required a separate finish to the paper. Then the book had been printed on, and so they were printed on a glossy paper and glued into the pages of the book. And so that's where the idea comes from, right? In terms of a practical mechanical design way of doing it. But the reason for doing it is I want the thing, not the picture of the thing.

Bethany
Well, and as you said, keeping her name in front of people. So in 2018, you made Elizabeth at 80, which is the 80th anniversary of her typeface. Elizabeth. And you had gotten some Elizabeth type by that point. How did that project come about? What is that like?

Graham
And I had I had some handmade paper that had been made for an English private press that was run by a group of nuns back in the 1960s. And, you know, when the nunnery closed down, all this brought all this fine handmade paper went on the market, and I managed to buy enough of it to print an edition of about 150 copies of this little, it's almost a keepsake, really, and it’s because, okay, now this is a long story and you might want to chop it up a bit, but I'll give you the whole story and.

Bethany
I have a very good editor. It's lovely. He's great. So yeah.

Graham
Okay. There was an English private press owner called Francis Meynell, and I am very taken with Francis Meynell and the way he ran the Nonesuch Press interests me. And there's quite a lot of source material available. Francis Meynell was working for an English advertising agency in London in 1942, by which time Elizabeth Friedlander, who had arrived in England in about well, late September, just before the war started in 1939.

And she had no English, but she did have a copy of Dante's Inferno, and she had Latin and she had Italian, and she used that with an English edition to learn English and choose working as a cook cleaner for a family who'd sponsored her to get out of Italy. In fact, where she'd gone when she first left Germany.

So she comes back to London, she learns. She comes to London, she learns English. And the first person she went to see was Francis Meynell, because he was known as a typographer. But he was also running a design agency. It was he who got her a job forging German documents. She turned up at his office. Fortunately, he was in.

She went, got an interview, she went in, she showed him her portfolio and he said, of course I know you. I know your face. By which she meant her typeface face. And he had done a review of it when it first came out in Germany in 1936, 37, 38. I had given a copy of New Borders to the St. Bride Institute library. They do guided tours. This is in London. And on one of these guided tours, Francis Meynell’s granddaughter, who's called Kate Meynell, saw this book sitting out on the table. One of the books that was on display for the group of people who were being shown round and flipping through it, recognized a book that all pages from the book that Elisabeth Friedlander had done with calligraphy as a wedding gift to her granddad.
 
Okay, so she got in touch with me and said that she had this book, Elizabeth Friedlander. She'd never been able to put two and two together. She'd never heard of Elizabeth Friedlander. She just knew the night the book gave her all the information she wanted. She's an installation artist, and she wanted to make a film about Elizabeth Friedlander.
 
And could I help her? So I put her in touch with Pauline Paucker, because they're both in London and I'm 250 miles north of London and not really much use, geographically, to anything that's going on in London itself. So she then made a film about Elizabeth Friedlander working with Pauline Paucker. She went to Cork, where Elizabeth Friedlander archive is now in Cork University. So she went to Cork, she made the film, and then she got a gig with Ditchling Museum, which is in Sussex, to put on an exhibition of Elizabeth Friedlander’s work, she talked Cork University into lending her material that they could put on display there.
 
Pauline Paucker was going to give a talk about Elizabeth Friedlander on the last day of the exhibition, a closing talk, but unfortunately Pauline was ill. I wanted to produce something that the people at the exhibition could put on display because there wasn't, you know, there isn't anything. There aren't. There isn't a set of Elizabeth Friedlander postcards, you know, that kind of merchandizing has not been done with her material.

Bethany

Yet.
 
 So that's where that book came from. The type itself is another story. The Bauer type foundry in Germany who issued the type had to change the name. It was going to be called Friedlander, but Friedlander is a recognizably Jewish name, and it's 1936 and the Nazis are in power. They arrested Georg Hartmann, who ran the foundry, and he was put in the Gestapo cells for a couple of nights before his influential friends got in out.
 
 Graham
 But he was very circumspect as he had to be about continuing to sell. I'm using the word Jewish in inverted commas, but Jewish types. It was against the regime. So he wrote to Elizabeth Friedlander and said to her, I'm sorry, I can't call this typeface Friedlander. I can only call it Elizabeth and are you agreeable to that? Friedlander being a recognizably Jewish name, so she had no choice but to agree to it.
 
 Well, otherwise the typeface wouldn't have come out. But Georg Hartmann was a good man. He opened a Bauer type foundry office in New York, and it was staffed by German Jews, who he got out of Germany and sent to New York to run the office. They carried on selling it and using it. There was some subterfuge that went on because, of course, well, the USA wasn't buying anything from Germany because there's a war on 1941, 42, 43.
 
 But Georg Hartmann also owned a type foundry in Spain, and Spain was not at war. So the typeface could be cast in Germany, shipped across Europe to Spain, and sent as cargo from Spain to be sold in the USA. And so that's how these Jews Hartmann had got out of Germany were able to carry on making a living living in Germany, in the USA through the Second World War.
 
 All of this comes together in my mind, with the fact that Elisabeth Friedlander designed letters for Winston Churchill's history of the Second World War. That series of letters had never been turned into type. They'd been printed from the equivalent of polymer plates, zincos, we call them for that particular book. But of course, Elisabeth Friedlander was a conscientious worker, and she designed the entire alphabet of capital letters.
 
 Graham
 So we found a fellow called Ed Rayher in in the States. And he cut new matrices for the type. So we now have Friedlander initials available as type.
 
Bethany
Cool.
 
Graham
So we gave her back her name. Yeah. So you can get Elisabeth's type mostly from America because of the offices in New York that distributed Bauer Alphabet, it was called. And we also have Friedlander initials, which had never been available. I mean, it was a typeface that came out or design that came out in 1948, and we had it made up as time for the first time two years ago.
 
Bethany
That's so cool for Elisabeth. How would you describe that to someone who's never seen it before?
 
Graham
Beautiful. It's as simple as that. It is a beautiful typeface. The letters are quite distinctive, but it's easy to read. It's not in an Italian style of lettering. It's not in a Dutch style of lettering. It's certainly not a German style of lettering in the old fashioned black letter sense, but it's a modern letter. It's a very much a 20th century letter, and it has its own oddness, quirkiness.
 
You know, the lower bowl of the lowercase g is open. So in other words, it's not a complete oval. The serifs themselves are not bracketed serifs, they tend to be. Yeah, they're all pretty much all un bracketed. So it's a designed face. It's not a pen drawn face. Although she was a calligrapher and she was a calligrapher before she was a type designer. So clearly it's grown out of her ability to pen letters. But it's not a pen drawn letter. It's not pretending to be a sloped Roman or an italic letter. Very nice. It's very nice indeed. I think she was taught by a man called Weiss. Or Weiss, as you would say. Because he’s German, but he was her teacher in Berlin in the 1920s at the Berlin Art Academy.
 
And I think she he was probably her, he's probably the guy who opened the doors for her to get work with the Bauer Type Foundry, because he was well known to Georg Hartmann and because he was a teacher at the art academy, he would know various people who could find jobs for willing and able students.
 
Bethany
Yeah. And what's really neat, which I'm putting together right now in real time. But Weiss studied with Anna Simons, who's the first episode of our series, because of her influence and so it is really cool to see like like here we have a direct line from Anna Simons to Elizabeth Friedlander, like through Weiss and calligraphy. Well.
 
Graham
The interesting thing with, with Weiss and, and Anna Simons is, is that he didn't go to many lessons with her. He was he was really self-taught. Yeah. And he went to on a, as an adult. You know, he was already a teacher of calligraphy when he went to her for additional lessons. But yes, it is interesting. And then it goes back to Alfred Johnson. And, you know, that whole English calligraphic school. Yes. It's fascinating. Another world. Yeah.
 
Bethany
You know, I love the fact that she like, worked for Mills and Boon as well as Penguin and did designs for them or like these alternative borders.
 
Graham
Being a freelancer, isn't it.

Bethany

Yeah. 

Graham

The fact that, you know, she was in total control of her own life. She had her own apartment, she had her own life, she had her own small circle of friends. And there was no bosses, you know, there was no one telling her she's got to do this, got to do that.
 
 And I mean, she got work at Penguin because you and she showed knew her work. And when he was brought over in 1946 47 to redesign Penguin Books, he knew Friedlander. So he gave her work. And then John Dreyfuss, who carried on Yancy Schultz, work. But in in the much more in the type world, employed her to do designs for Monotype, you know, so there were monotype ornaments that were designed by Elizabeth Friedlander.
 
 And she had these, these, these very clear circles of friendship. Yeah, but she was in charge. She was a freelancer. She ran her own life, you know, she wasn't working for a weekly or a monthly wage. She was taking commissions that she, you know, she could turn things down if she wanted to, or she could give them as much time as she desired. And I think that's admirable. You know, it says something about the person's resilience. I mean, you know, she lost a good job in Germany. She lost a good job in Italy, neither of them through any fault of her own. And she comes here and she has no friendship network.
 
 Bethany
 Right?
 
 Graham
 You know, she knows nobody. She comes here as a as a cook house cleaner working for a Quaker family who sponsored her to come from Italy. She's a domestic servant and the first thing she has to do is learn English.
 
 Bethany
 Yeah.
 
 Graham
 And all she's got is her portfolio of work. And it's her portfolio of work that introduces her. Of course I know you. I know your face, says Francis Meynell. You know, and bang, she's in, in and away, you know, it's terrific. It's a great story.
 
 Bethany
 It is a great story. It's a it's just been such a joy to talk with you. So Incline Press, just had 30 years of business, which is amazing. Congratulations.
 
 Graham
 Thank you.
 
 Bethany
 So, I mean, what keeps you doing this work? Clearly, you care about it. Clearly you have interest. But, like.
 
 Graham
 What else am I going to do? Watch television? Hell with that, I love it.
 
 Bethany
 What's next? Or what are the. You know, you said you have a few things on, but other things you want to talk about that are on your horizon for your work or.
 
 Graham
 Yeah, that there was an illiterate, now semi-literate English book dealer in Manchester. Okay. In the first quarter of the 19th century called James Weatherley. And in around about 1860, a local antiquarian went to James Weatherley and said Jem, you've been selling books for a very long time, and you knew all the great book collectors in the city of Manchester at the beginning of the century.
 
 If you were to write your autobiography, I would be willing to pay you the grand sum of 5 pounds for it. Well, by this time Jem Weatherley is an old man, and he is not literate enough to write anything, but his daughter is. So he dictates a memoir to his daughter, and he gets as far as, if I remember rightly, about 1840, 41 has a heart attack and dies.

Bethany
You know.

Graham
Right. So we've got his memoir, which starts in about the year 1799 with his birth, and he continues it to 1741. And that's it. But there are no full stops. There are no capital letters, there is no punctuation, but there are wide gaps. And when you start to read this, you realize that the wide gaps are where he paused to take a breath. Now, sometimes it's in the middle of a sentence and sometimes it's at the end of a sentence. But his daughter left the gap, so this is in manuscript. It's written in a old ledger, and the original is in a local library in Manchester called Chetham's Library. And we have it transcribed, and I'm going to print that.

Bethany
That's going to be so cool.

Graham
Yeah, I think so. And we follow the exactly as Jem laid it out. In other words, there is no pagination, but okay, it's in year order. And she writes the year in the margin. So, you know, when you get to 1836, he writes 1830 or his daughter writes 1836, in the margin, and he just carries on talking. Managed to find mostly steel engravings of all the book collectors he talks about in the memoir, we've got lots of ephemera from Manchester of the period, lots of locally printed things, including such things as the card invites you to come to James Weatherley’s funeral. We've also got the little ticket that he used when he was the secondhand book dealer, he used to put a little ticket in the back of the books with his name and address on. So we've got a facsimile of that to stick in in our book in exactly the same place. So this is going to be another book of tip-in and on, because it was written in a ledger, the book itself is going to be the same size as that ledger, and it's going to be covered in ledger paper. So it looks like a ledger, and it's going to be printed with the word ledger upside down on the back cover, because that's how the original thing actually appears. So it's a if you like, it's like a type version of a manuscript book.

Bethany
That's and you're and just again, because everyone's listening from different places, you're just north of Manchester, right.

Graham
And yes. Where if you like. Now it's a suburb. It's built up. We're about eight miles from Manchester city center on the way to the hills that are the Pennines, which are the hills that go right up the center of England.

Bethany
Where would you like people to find you online or in real life?

Graham
Well, incline press.com, it's easy enough. So that's, that's that'll do.

Bethany
And this has been so great. Thank you again for taking the time.

Graham
Thank you.

Joe
Hi, everyone. This is Cousin Joe, the editor of Re(un)covered podcast with a rather sad update. In July of 2025, Graham Moss, who we just heard from, from Incline Press, sadly passed away after a stint with a short illness. Incline Press was a remarkable press, which in its lifetime published more than 120 limited edition books through the tireless efforts of Graham Moss. And, he was just such a joy to talk to such an enthusiast, such a just living legend, honestly. And it was hard to edit what he said, because just everything out of his mouth was just so brilliant.

Joe
If you're looking for more of Graham's work, you can check out Incline Press, which still maintains a web presence. Or you can go to Helen Moss's website, who survives Graham. Very sad. Yeah. You know, it's always just, a sad update when, someone so, so great passes away. So our heart goes out to Graham and Helen Moss.
 
Bethany
We uncovered is created and produced by me, Bethany Qualls. Our editor is Joe DeGrand. And we are supported by listeners like you. Like what you hear. Keep listening. We love it. Subscribe to uncovered wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. Positive is great. Thanks for listening. We'll see you again in the archives soon.