Toshna

Classic Garaldic

Toshna is a classic Garaldic typeface family with three true optical sizes. The Display weight for titles and headlines is very narrow, thin, and graceful. The Book weight for body text is drawn much wider, with robust, bold details. Punctuation and accents serve the needs of body text. They are much larger and more legible.

Toshna specimen

I wanted to design a typeface, a book Garaldic on a classical basis for our time. Not fashionable, but with new elements and forms, fair, clear and easy to read.

This is how Hellmuth Tschörtner describes his typeface, the Tschörtner-Antiqua, which was published in 1955 as a foundry type and for Linotype line machines. It would remain the calligrapher and book designer's only typeface. Along with Herbert Thannhaeuser's expensive redesign of the universally acclaimed Garamond, his typeface was one of the first new typefaces to be created in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Its design reflects the spirit of the body copy typefaces that were being published at the time, and it stands in a line with the typefaces of Hermann Zapf and Georg Trump.