Johannes Enschedé

Johannes Enschedé (Haarlem, 10 June 1708 – Haarlem, 21 November 1780) was the central figure in the transformation of the Enschedé family workshop from a successful Haarlem printing house into the foremost Dutch typefounding enterprise of the later eighteenth century. Printer, publisher, newspaper proprietor, typefounder, wood engraver, collector of early printing and practical historian of typography, he differed fundamentally from the learned printers whose reputations rested upon classical scholarship or authorship. His education was limited and his antiquarian investigations were grounded primarily in the material knowledge of a craftsman: type, punches, matrices, casting, woodblocks, presswork, paper and the physical evidence left by printing processes. That technical culture shaped both sides of his career. Commercially, he combined municipal printing, newspaper publication and typefounding into a business sufficiently secure to finance costly expansion; historically, he assembled early printed books and surviving typographical material because he believed that the origins and development of printing could be reconstructed from the artefacts of the craft itself. The celebrated Proef van letteren dated 1768 brought these two activities together: it was simultaneously a commercial specimen of one of Europe's most important foundries and a deliberately historical representation of the lineage of printing that Enschedé believed his Haarlem workshop continued.

The basic chronology requires correction of several dates that have entered derivative accounts. Johannes was born in Haarlem on 10 June 1708, not on 10 November, and died there on 21 November 1780. His parents were Izaak Enschedé and Beeltje van der Lucht. Izaak himself had been born at Haarlem in 1681; the Enschedés were descended from a Groningen family, and Johannes's grandfather, another Johannes, had settled at Haarlem as an instrument maker. There is therefore no need to posit the Westphalian origin sometimes attributed to the printing family. Izaak entered the Haarlem printers' guild on 21 June 1703, the date subsequently treated as the foundation of the firm. His son grew up not beside a merely “modest” press awaiting transformation at adulthood but inside an established artisanal business whose technical world became his principal education.

Johannes appears to have received relatively little extended formal schooling. He had drawing lessons from Frans Decker, but by 1719, at only eleven years of age, he was already working as an apprentice in his father's shop. His early interest in graphic technique extended beyond typesetting: he learned to cut figures in wood and became sufficiently proficient that in 1729 he entered Haarlem's Guild of St Luke in the capacity of figuursnijder. Three years earlier, in 1726, he had been admitted to the printers' guild and had become his father's business partner. The frequently repeated date 1734 for his entry into partnership is therefore too late. His training in woodcutting should likewise not be confused with documentary proof that he personally cut the metal punches of the typefaces later associated with his foundry. Enschedé understood the manufacture and use of type intimately, but the great eighteenth-century faces of the house were principally the work of professional punchcutters whom he commissioned.

On 23 December 1736 Johannes married Helena Hoefnagel, with whom he established the family branch that would continue the business. The following year fundamentally changed the scale and financial structure of the enterprise. On 6 July 1737 the Haarlem authorities appointed Izaak and Johannes Enschedé ordinary city printers and courantiers; they acquired from the Casteleyn heirs the right to publish the Oprechte Haerlemsche Courant, and the first number printed under their responsibility appeared on 9 July 1737. The newspaper, already one of the longest-established and most respected news publications of the Dutch Republic, was not a peripheral adjunct to the foundry. It furnished regular work, institutional standing and a continuous commercial base different from the uncertain economics of individual books. Its production also placed the Enschedés inside international channels of information, since foreign correspondence, translated news and diplomatic reporting were the raw materials of an eighteenth-century newspaper.

The acquisition did not produce effortless profit from the beginning. From 1741 Izaak and Johannes also published the monthly De Europise Staats-secretaris, a news digest that could reproduce documents and supply commentary too extensive for the Courant. Modern research has suggested that this supplementary periodical was partly an attempt to extract additional revenue from the expensive information network maintained for the newspaper. Its treatment of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 shows that the Enschedé enterprise was doing more than mechanically reprinting news: the monthly digest assembled diplomatic documents, commented upon them and marketed political information in a different temporal format from the thrice-weekly newspaper. Johannes's publishing career therefore developed through an early form of media diversification before the typefoundry became its most celebrated branch.

The decisive move into typefounding came in 1743, when Izaak and Johannes acquired the Amsterdam foundry associated with the Wetstein family, generally described in contemporary and later records as the foundry of the heirs of Hendrik Floris Wetstein. This purchase requires more precision than the common claim that it immediately delivered to Enschedé the entire historical patrimony of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Netherlandish typefounding. Its most consequential living asset was the connection with Joan Michael Fleischmann, the Nuremberg-born punchcutter who had established his own foundry in Amsterdam in 1732, sold it to the Wetstein interest in 1735 and continued to cut type for that establishment. After the transfer to Haarlem in 1743, Fleischmann produced a very large part of his subsequent work for the Enschedés, though he remained an independent craftsman rather than simply an employee resident in their workshop.

Already in 1744 the Enschedés issued an Épreuve des caractères advertising the newly acquired foundry. This early specimen establishes that typefounding was conceived from the outset as a commercial business requiring its own printed marketing. A type specimen had a double function: printers could judge what fonts were available for purchase, while the foundry could create a visual hierarchy among its products and advertise technical modernity without printing a conventional discursive catalogue. The acquisition of the Wetstein establishment consequently added a new commodity to the family business. Instead of merely consuming type in their own press, the Enschedés could manufacture and sell it to other printers, allowing capital invested in punches and matrices to generate revenue over many years.

Fleischmann became the dominant creative force in this programme. His romans and italics are characterized by increasingly sharp contrasts between heavy stems and fine strokes, large x-heights in smaller bodies, finely cut details and an energetic density very different from the darker Dutch types of the preceding century. His value to Enschedé was especially great in small sizes, where the technical difficulty of preserving clarity under conditions of tiny punchcutting separated exceptional craftsmen from routine founders. The 1768 specimen would display numerous Fleischmann romans, italics, blackletters, Greek and non-Latin fonts, as well as music types. Enschedé understood that the commercial identity of a foundry could be built around the reputation of an individual cutter, and he repeatedly publicized Fleischmann as an exceptional master. The later tendency to treat “Enschedé type” as though Johannes himself had designed these alphabets obscures precisely the industrial organization that made the foundry successful: Enschedé commissioned, selected, financed, cast, marketed and preserved the work of specialist punchcutters.

His dealings with Jacques-François Rosart make the distinction still clearer. Rosart, born at Namur in 1714 and active at Haarlem from 1740, remained largely an independent punchcutter. He supplied Enschedé with types during the 1740s and again in the 1750s, particularly larger display alphabets, decorated capitals and ornaments, while Fleischmann received much of the more prestigious work for small text sizes. Rosart later complained that the Enschedés had magnified Fleischmann's reputation while insufficiently acknowledging his own contribution. The rivalry was commercially real: Rosart ultimately left Haarlem for Brussels in 1759. His work nevertheless remained an important component of the foundry's visual repertoire, particularly in display letters, fleurons and music-related typography.

By the 1750s Johannes had effectively become the driving force behind the printing and typefounding sides of the family enterprise. A modern reconstruction places him in control of the press and foundry from approximately 1751, although his father remained alive until 1 May 1761. After Izaak's death the newspaper also passed fully under Johannes's responsibility. The distinction is useful because the business did not change ownership in a single dramatic moment: authority moved progressively from the founder to his son. Johannes's expansion strategy can then be followed through further acquisitions. In 1760 he acquired material from the foundry associated with Cornelis Nozeman, and in 1767 he purchased part of the stock of Jan Roman and Company. The latter purchase was especially important historically because the Roman foundry descended in part from older Amsterdam material and brought Enschedé matrices connected with early Dutch typefounding.

It was principally through these successive acquisitions, rather than through the Wetstein purchase alone, that the Haarlem foundry became a repository of older typographical material. Part of the stock acquired from Jan Roman in 1767 had descended through earlier Dutch foundries associated with the tradition of Christoffel van Dijck; it also included exceptionally early matrices connected with Henric Lettersnider, active around the turn of the sixteenth century. Enschedé recognized at once that such material could possess negligible contemporary commercial value and considerable historical value. In annotations to early printed books he explicitly recorded occasions when the matrices used for a historical type were now preserved in his own Haarlem foundry. A modern typefounder might no longer wish to cast the face, but to Enschedé the matrices survived as physical evidence of how the craft had developed.

This attitude distinguishes him from a mere accumulator of obsolete industrial equipment. The foundry became both a working business and a historical collection of tools. Enschedé could compare a sixteenth-century printed letter with surviving matrices, identify recurrence of the same types in different editions and study technical changes from one generation of founders to another. His judgments were not always correct, and later owners of the firm did not preserve everything he had valued: much old material, including significant Van Dijck matrices, was eventually melted in the early nineteenth century when changing taste made it appear useless. The familiar claim that Johannes Enschedé preserved intact the complete typographical heritage of the Dutch Golden Age is therefore too strong. What he did do, exceptionally for his period, was recognize old matrices and punches as historical artefacts rather than simply metal awaiting reuse.

The same instinct directed his collection of early printed books. Johannes was not principally a bibliophile in the later sense of pursuing perfect, luxurious or textually important copies. A modern reconstruction of material identifiable as his has found approximately 258 early editions, including 179 incunable editions represented by 187 surviving or documented copies, heavily weighted toward printing from the northern Netherlands. Their content interested him less than their physical evidence. Indeed, Jos van Heel has emphasized that Enschedé could not read Latin fluently enough for the texts themselves to determine his collecting. He collected specimens of printing: particular types, early woodcuts, anonymous presses, typographical peculiarities and books he believed connected with the beginnings of the Haarlem craft. Incomplete books, fragments and worn bindings could therefore be perfectly useful to him if they preserved evidence about type or presswork.

His own annotations show an unusually material approach to bibliography. He compared reused woodblocks across editions, attempted to identify anonymous printers from their types, examined impressions for evidence of how sheets had been positioned in the press and recorded physical irregularities that he thought revealed casting or printing technique. In copies of early books he added notes linking their printed characters to matrices in his foundry. Some identifications were ingenious; others were demonstrably wrong. He could associate unsigned woodcuts rather freely with famous artists and occasionally misdate or misidentify fragments because his technical intuition exceeded his knowledge of texts and chronology. This mixture of perceptiveness and error is precisely what makes him historically interesting. He practised an early form of analytical bibliography from the standpoint of an experienced printer rather than that of a university historian.

Nowhere is this clearer than in his study of the origins of printing and his passionate defence of Laurens Janszoon Coster as the inventor of typography. The Haarlem Coster legend, no longer accepted by modern scholarship, had strong civic significance. For Enschedé it also possessed professional meaning: if printing had originated in Haarlem, his own foundry could be represented as the inheritor of the place where the art itself had begun. He accumulated what he called the earliest Haarlem productions, examined blockbooks and fragments and attempted to reconstruct the sequence from xylographic printing to movable metal type. His argument was not simply antiquarian patriotism. He tried to support it with observations drawn from the shapes of individual letters, casting irregularities, blind impressions, register and press construction.

Around 1760 he subjected copies of the Spiegel der menselijker behoudenisse to particularly close examination. He noted inverted type, printing errors, blind impressions and irregularities in repeated characters and concluded that the work had been produced from cast movable type. Comparison of two copies led him to speculate about the wooden structure of the earliest press and the procedure by which areas of a sheet might have been masked during successive impressions. When he later acquired a 1478 book printed by Peter Schoeffer, he studied the position of point-holes and attempted to infer exactly how a folio sheet had been laid on the press. The historical conclusions were conditioned by the erroneous Coster chronology, but the manner of looking at books — reading physical traces as evidence of workshop practice — was remarkably concrete.

His encounter with the jurist and bibliophile Gerard Meerman turned these questions into a major scholarly controversy. Meerman had begun preparing his history of the invention of printing and around 1760 approached Enschedé about producing the book. Their early collaboration included physical examination of paper and plans for exact typographical facsimiles. Differences over how the technology of printing had evolved eventually became irreconcilable, and Enschedé withdrew as printer of Meerman's Origines typographicae of 1765. He nevertheless supplied type material to the Hague printer who executed the work and remained involved in the creation of facsimiles. Both men supported Haarlem's Coster claim, but they disagreed about the mechanics by which block printing had supposedly developed into movable type. The episode is important because Enschedé was not simply providing technical services to an antiquarian author: he considered practical knowledge of casting and printing to confer its own historical authority.

Enschedé intended to publish his own history of early printing, and substantial manuscript materials survive. They include analyses of early editions, descriptions of the Haarlem Spiegel, notes on the first principles of printing and a projected structure for a much larger book. One manuscript was entitled Eerste beginselen der boek-drukkonst in het begin der vijftiende eeuw door Laurens Jansz. Koster. Another scheme ranged extraordinarily widely, from the earliest books and the development of printing to modern printing and typefounding and the organization of a library. He continued revising a reasoned register of his early printed books from about 1765–70 until shortly before his death. None of this material reached the public in the comprehensive form he envisaged. His historical authorship is therefore represented less by a finished treatise than by an archive of working observations, annotations and aborted publication projects.

The work in which his antiquarian and commercial ambitions most successfully converged was the Proef van letteren, welke gegooten worden in de nieuwe Haerlemsche lettergietery van J. Enschedé, dated 1768. Its bibliographical history requires some qualification: the preface is dated 30 November 1768, while elements found in surviving copies, including Fleischmann's engraved portrait, carry 1769, indicating that completion and assembly extended beyond the date printed on the title. It is therefore best described as the 1768 specimen while recognizing that its manufacture crossed into the following year. Rather than a conventional paginated book, much of it consists of specimen sheets printed on one side, accompanied by introductory matter, engravings and a price list.

Its visual programme was unusually self-conscious. Cornelis van Noorde engraved a portrait of Johannes Enschedé showing him explicitly as lettergieter en boekdrukker, holding a compositor's stick; the volume also contained a portrait of Fleischmann, representations connected with Coster and an engraved view of the foundry interior. The introductory text was itself set in a script type, turning the preface into a demonstration of the foundry's repertoire before the formal specimens even began. Roman and italic faces, blackletter, decorated capitals, Greek, Hebrew and other non-Latin material, ornaments and music types followed. In commercial terms the purpose was obvious: prospective customers could select type and consult prices. But the inclusion and explicit identification of older faces converted the catalogue into a historical exhibition as well.

Fleischmann, who died on 27 May 1768, dominates the modern reputation of the volume for good reason. The specimen includes numerous faces cut at different moments of his career, allowing readers to compare his evolving approach to roman, italic, gothic and specialized types. Enschedé's introductory praise presented the punchcutter's work as a patrimony capable of serving future generations. Yet the book is not simply a Fleischmann memorial. It deliberately places contemporary types beside historic material, including gothic types associated with Christoffel van Dijck and characters whose matrices had entered the foundry only through recent acquisitions. The juxtaposition made a claim about the foundry itself: Haarlem possessed both the resources of current typographical fashion and tangible remains of earlier Dutch typefounding.

Music printing formed another significant part of this technological programme. Both Rosart and Fleischmann experimented with systems intended to simplify the composition of musical notation, a field in which the number and combination of required sorts made movable-type production especially demanding. Fleischmann's later work for the Enschedés became entangled in an international priority dispute involving Rosart and French typefounders such as Fournier. The arguments were partly about invention and partly about commercial access to the lucrative market for printed music. The episode illustrates an important feature of Enschedé's business strategy: specialized type was valuable not merely as virtuoso craftsmanship but because it allowed a foundry to supply printers working in fields that ordinary roman and italic fonts could not serve.

By the 1760s the Haarlem foundry had acquired a reputation sufficiently great that visits became part of the cultural itinerary of distinguished travellers in the Dutch Republic. Enschedé began keeping a visitors' book in 1757, and foreign visitors were shown the foundry, historic matrices and his collections. A traveller who visited him only three weeks before his death described an elderly proprietor eager to discuss Coster, display his historical objects and conduct guests through the typefoundry that remained his particular pride. This semi-public presentation of the workshop was commercially intelligent but also reveals how Enschedé understood the foundry: not only as a manufacturing establishment but as a place where the technological past and present of printing could be demonstrated materially.

His household and family succession were organized increasingly around the continuity of the business. Johannes and Helena Hoefnagel's three surviving sons included Johannes Enschedé II, Jacobus Enschedé and Abraham Enschedé. In 1776 Johannes I brought the two elder sons, Johannes II and Jacobus, formally into the enterprise. From 1777 the business used the name Joh. Enschedé en Zonen, establishing the designation under which it would become internationally famous. Abraham would also become active in the family concern, but the transition begun before their father's death involved the two older brothers specifically. Johannes thus had time to turn an enterprise inherited from Izaak into a deliberately dynastic house rather than leaving an unresolved proprietorship to his heirs.

The later history of Joh. Enschedé en Zonen should nevertheless be kept distinct from Johannes I's personal achievement. The firm's celebrated production of government securities, banknotes and postage stamps belongs chiefly to the nineteenth and later centuries. Its first government bond printing followed only toward the end of Johannes's life; Dutch banknote production began decades after his death, and postage stamps later still. To present him retrospectively as the founder of a modern security-printing corporation obscures the eighteenth-century structure he actually created. His business rested upon the Oprechte Haerlemsche Courant, municipal and commercial printing, the sale of type, a growing foundry archive and the reputation of the workshop as a centre of typographical expertise. Later generations converted those assets into different forms of secure and industrial printing.

Johannes died at Haarlem on 21 November 1780, only weeks after still conducting visitors through the establishment. His collections remained substantially within the family for several generations. After the death of his grandson Johannes III, the great Enschedé library was dispersed at auction in 1867 in more than three thousand lots, a catalogue that remains indispensable for reconstructing the combined collecting of Izaak, Johannes I and Johannes II. Modern investigation has been able to identify many books that once belonged specifically to Johannes I through his characteristic annotations. The dispersion had the paradoxical result of distributing the physical evidence of his investigations among libraries throughout Europe while preserving, through provenance, traces of the historical questions he had asked of them.

His most durable contribution consequently lies neither in a single typeface nor in a conventional authorial bibliography. Johannes Enschedé was an organizer of typographical knowledge. He built a business in which current newspaper publishing financed and interacted with the capital-intensive manufacture of type; commissioned craftsmen such as Fleischmann and Rosart rather than confusing proprietorship with design; purchased competing foundries and thereby assembled both commercially useful and historically obsolete matrices; made those materials visible through specimens; and applied the practical eye of a printer to early books whose physical construction fascinated him more than their texts. His defence of Coster was wrong in its central historical claim, and some of his identifications were equally mistaken, but those errors do not cancel the methodological interest of his work. By treating type, matrices, woodblocks, point-holes, blind impressions, reused images and variant copies as historical evidence, he approached early printing through the surviving objects of the craft itself. The Proef van letteren of 1768 is the most concentrated expression of that achievement: a sales catalogue in which the active foundry, its craftsmen and the material history of European typography were made to occupy the same book.