Blackletter Blackletter or Gothic script is an old way to write. Blackletter in writing or print was used in Western Europe from about 1150 to the 17th century. It was used for printing in Germany until the 20th century. Letter shapes in printing were copied from letter shapes in a style of handwriting. So, the Gothic script of northern Europe and the Latin script used in Italy were both copied into print typography. The name Gothic script Some people call blackletter Old English. This is not right, because Old English is a language, not a script, and many centuries older. Also Gothic script has nothing to do with the Goths. They lived in central Europe from the 3rd to 6th century and wrote in runes. Blackletter must not be confused either with the ancient Gothic alphabet or with the sans-serif typefaces that are also sometimes called Gothic. The term Gothic was first used to describe this script in fifteenth century Italy, in the midst of the Renaissance. Scholars thought it was a barbaric script: Gothic was a synonym for barbaric. Not only were blackletter forms called Gothic script, but any other seemingly barbarian script was also labeled "Gothic". Blackletter (also black letter or sometimes black-letter; popularly known as Gothic) was originally a medieval book hand (Textualis or Textura) of the Gothic family of scripts, later adapted into typefaces and still used in modern calligraphy and typesetting. The book script was used throughout Western Europe from approximately the late 12th until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish until the 1870s, Finnish until the turn of the 20th century, Estonian and Latvian until the 1930s, and for the German language until the 1940s, when Adolf Hitler officially banned it in 1941. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes the entire group of blackletter faces is referred to as Fraktur. Blackletter, although sometimes called Old English lettering, is not to be confused with the Old English language, which predates blackletter by many centuries and was written in the insular script or in Futhorc runes. Along with Italic type and Roman type, blackletter served as one of the major typefaces in the history of Western typography. Whilst black letter does have a specific meaning in manuscript palaeography, the term today more often refers to typefaces, for example the Fraktur unicode block. Textualis, also known as textura or "Gothic book hand", was the most calligraphic form of blackletter, and today is the form most associated with "Gothic". Johannes Gutenberg carved a textualis typeface—including a large number of ligatures and common abbreviations—when he printed his 42-line Bible. However, textualis was rarely used for typefaces after this. While an antiqua typeface is usually a compound of roman types and italic types since the 16th-century French typographers, the blackletter typefaces never developed a similar distinction. Instead, they use letterspacing (German Sperrung) for emphasis. When blackletter is letterspaced, ligatures like ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ck⟩, ⟨tz⟩ or ⟨ſt⟩ remain together without additional letterspacing (⟨ſt⟩ is dissolved, though). The use of bold text for emphasis is also alien to blackletter typefaces. Words from other languages, especially from Romance languages, including Latin, are usually typeset in antiqua instead of blackletter. The practice of setting foreign words or phrases in antiqua within a blackletter text does not apply to loanwords that have been incorporated into the language. Printers of the late 15th and early 16th centuries commonly used blackletter typefaces, but under the influence of Renaissance tastes, Roman typefaces grew in popularity, until by about 1590 most presses had converted to them. However, blackletter was considered to be more readily legible (especially by the less literate classes of society), and it therefore remained in use throughout the 17th century and into the 18th for documents intended for widespread dissemination, such as proclamations and Acts of Parliament, and for literature aimed at the common people, such as ballads, chivalric romances, and jokebooks. Chaucer's works had been printed in blackletter in the late 15th century, but were subsequently more usually printed in Roman type. Horace Walpole wrote in 1781 that "I am too, though a Goth, so modern a Goth that I hate the black letter, and I love Chaucer better in Dryden and Baskerville than in his own language and dress." Schwabacher typefaces dominated in Germany from about 1480 to 1530, and the style continued in use occasionally until the 20th century. Most importantly, all of the works of Martin Luther, leading to the Protestant Reformation, as well as the Apocalypse of Albrecht Dürer (1498), used this typeface. Johann Bämler, a printer from Augsburg, probably first used it as early as 1472. The origins of the name remain unclear; some assume that a typeface-carver from the village of Schwabach—one who worked externally and who thus became known as the Schwabacher—designed the typeface. Johann Gutenberg used a textualis typeface for his famous Gutenberg Bible in 1455. Schwabacher, a blackletter with more rounded letters, soon became the usual printed typeface, but it was replaced by Fraktur in the early 17th century. Schwabacher was a blackletter form that was much used in early German print typefaces. It continued to be used occasionally until the 20th century. Characteristics of Schwabacher are: Fraktur is a form of blackletter that became the most common German blackletter typeface by the mid-16th century. Its use was so common that often any blackletter form is called Fraktur in Germany. Characteristics of Fraktur are: 'Manual of Latin Palaeography' (A comprehensive PDF file containing 82 pages profusely illustrated, January 2024). Learn Blackletter Online Association for the German Script and Language Pfeffer Simpelgotisch A simple OpenType blackletter font setting