While Indra Kupferschmid may on paper be a full-time academic, her research practice might better be described as “fanatic-on-call” or “easily distracted” than in any scholarly terms. A lover of a good timeline, endless arguments on terminology, the finer semantics of typography, technology, and in a long term love-hate-relationship with type classification, her research interests broadly lie in the history of 20th century type in continental Europe and beyond.

This talk will outline some of the things she’s been digging up recently – part self-initiated, part through the provocation of colleagues who never fail to drop unexpected and difficult questions in her inbox. How many Helveticas are there? Or how many different versions of R’s for Helvetica are there? Did Ferdinand Theinhardt have anything to do with Berthold’s Akzidenz-Grotesk? Where do the letters on Croatian bus stop signs come from? How did they make type, here, there, then, now?