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Johann Michael Fleischmann was born in 1707 in the small town of Wördt, near Nuremberg. In 1728 he arrived in the Netherlands; in that year he worked for over a month as type caster for Izaak van der Putte in Amsterdam. He then traveled to The Hague and found employment in the type foundry of the booksellers Rutger Christoffel Alberts and Hermanus Uytwerf. When Alberts withdrew from the business, Uytwerf moved the trade to Amsterdam and Fleischmann traveled with him. Fleischmann worked for Uytwerf until 1732, before he started working independently as a punchcutter. In 1735 he opened a type foundry, which, however, was unsuccessful due to a lack of business acumen.

The printer Rudolph Wetstein took over the Fleischmann type foundry. Fleischmann remained involved in the business and made a large number of punches and matrices exclusively for Wetstein. The latter died in 1742 and his son Hendrik Floris sold the printing business but continued the foundry. In 1743 Wetstein jr. sold the not flourishing foundry to Izaak and Johannes Enschedé. Fleischmann then went on to produce type exclusively for the Enschedés.

From 1748 Fleischmann also worked with the permission of Johannes Enschedé for other type foundries, such as those of Van der Putte, Jacob Cambier, Martin Weyer, and the Ploos van Amstel brothers. Fleischmann died in Amsterdam in 1768; he was buried in the Old Lutheran Church.

In 1992 the Dutch Type Library commissioned the German type designer Erhard Kaiser to make dtl Fleischmann. The digital family has become very extensive: in addition to display and text versions, there are, for example, beautiful series of ligatures, which, of course, do not lack the ‘long s’. Also noteworthy are the special tabular figures for small capitals.
        Kaiser has added semi-bold and bold variants to the historical garnitures, making the typeface particularly complete. In Germany, therefore, it is referred to as ‘Kaisers königliche Fleischmann’.

dtl Fleischmann is used in literary publications, but was also the corporate typeface of F. van Lanschot Bankiers for a long time. A German type specimen of dtl Fleischmann (pdf edition) appeared in 2000.

Erhard Kaiser

Detail of the in
2000 published specimen of dtl Fleischmann

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