Neufville Typefoundry
| Font | |
| Industry | Type foundry |
| Headquarters | Barcelona, Spain |
| Website | www |
Fundición Tipográfica Neufville or the Neufville Typefoundry was a well-known Type Foundry in Barcelona and the most important supplier of the Printing Industry in Spain during the 20th century.
Discovered punches and matrices testify that the origin of the company goes back to the 16th century, when German printers brought Gutenberg's invention to Spain. The foundry belonged to the convent of San José of Barcelona and in the year 1880 became property of the printing house Narciso Ramírez Y Rialp, who sold it in 1885 to the Frankfurt am Main-based Bauer Type Foundry (Bauersche Giesserei). The company continued its operations under the name of J. de Neufville, directed by Jacobo de Neufville, who belonged to a patrician family from Frankfurt, which was involved in the company. He was soon removed from the business for health reasons, and the company became known as “Sucesores de J. de Neufville”.
In 1922, Carlos Hartmann, son of Georg Hartmann, the owner of the Bauer Type Foundry, turned the company into a Spanish-law society under the name of Fundición Tipográfica Neufville, SA. Under his direction the company started distributing the most prestigious German Printing Machinery, thus acquiring a great popularity in Spain's graphic world.
Contributing to the company's reputation were its educational publications, such as “Anuario Neufville”, published since 1910, and, since 1920, “Crónica Poligráfica”, directed by Eudald Canibell.
In the field of Typography, Neufville cast, using matrices received from the Bauer Type Foundry, the creations of Lucian Bernhard, E. R. Weiss, Ernst Schneidler, Imre Reiner, Paul Renner, Heinrich Jost, Dr. Konrad Bauer, and Walter Baum. “Futura”, designed by Paul Renner in 1924, was the one that obtained the most international success, becoming possibly the best-selling typeface of all time. An example of its prominence is the fact that in 1969 the first astronauts to land on the moon placed a plaque with an inscription made in Futura.
From the 1960s, Letterpress printing started to decline in favor of Offset printing. New procedures of text composition appeared—first photocomposition and then desktop publishing from digital sources—which were more rational than those using lead types. But, despite the odds, the Neufville Typefoundry managed to maintain a strong production of lead types through acquisitions of prominent foundries: Fundición Tipográfica Nacional in 1971, the Bauer Type Foundry in 1972, Fonderie Typographique Française in 1974, matrices of the Lettergieterij Amsterdam in 1984, Ludwig & Mayer in 1985, and Fonderies Tyographiques Réunies del Líbano (United Type Foundries of Lebanon) in 1988. In 1974, it opened a branch near Paris, Neufville France, to supply lead types to France, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, an activity that lasted until 1995.
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