Kabella

The Klingspor Foundry in Germany released Rudolf Koch’s Kabel typeface in 1927. It was a new style (a geometric sans-serif), hot on the heels of Paul Renner’s smash hit Futura, which was released the same year.

Kabel was also an instant hit, and soon Klingspor was releasing more weights and styles to add to the Kabel family. The oddest member of the family is also the rarest: a set of swash capitals Koch designed to pair with Kabel’s italic lowercase.

Kabel’s swash capitals are rarely seen in the historic ephemera that survives in collections today, and to date I have yet to see an in-use example of it. Klingspor did print a full specimen booklet of it, showing various sizes, which implies they had a full set of matrices and were prepared to fulfill orders for it, but was there any demand for it? The lack of surviving in-use examples of it seems to hint that there wasn’t.

So why put all the work into digitizing a historic typeface whose commercial viability was questionable at best? For starters, this began for me as a school project back in 2017, so much of the work was already done then. Since publishing a case study of it on my website, I’ve had a number of inquiries about it, from a variety of people interested in type history, Rudolf Koch, and early 20th century German design.

I’ve revisited the typeface now with more experienced eyes, fixing many small details, improving the overall drawing quality, and making one major change: reducing the enormous difference in height between the capitals and the lowercase. Koch’s swash capitals stood much taller than the lowercase they were set with, even in samples of running text in the specimen booklet. My adjustments reveal the genius in Koch’s design: setting swash caps in running text is a completely insane idea, but it works far better than anyone might imagine, before seeing it.