Victor Hammer

Victor Karl Hammer (September 9, 1882 – October 7, 1967), was an Austrian-born American painter, sculptor, printer, and typographer.

Hammer was born in Vienna, Austria to Karl and Maria (Fuhrmann) Hammer. He began his apprenticeship in architecture at the age of fifteen in the studio of Camillo Sitte, author of Der Staedte-Bau nach seinen kuenstlerischen Graundsaetzen. In 1898, he transferred to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, which he left ten years later.

Hammer produced his first type design, Hammer Uncial, in 1921. In 1922, he moved to Florence, Italy, where he set up a printing press. In 1929, he moved his printing operation into the Villa Santuccio in Florence and named it the Stamperia del Santuccio. The first book that was printed in this operation was Milton's Samson Agonistes (1931), using what would be known as his Samson Uncial type. Punches for the type were cut by Paul Koch, son of Rudolf Koch. Hammer moved to Kolbsheim in Alsace in 1934, where he designed and built a chapel on an estate for a friend.

From 1936 to 1939, Hammer lived in Vienna, where he served as professor at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste. In 1939, he secretly fled Vienna due to Anti Semitism and immigrated to the United States with his first wife, where he taught at Wells College in Aurora, New York until 1948. Here, he produced American Uncial – the best known of his five typefaces.

In 1948, Hammer settled in Lexington, Kentucky and was artist-in-residence at Transylvania University, a post he held until retirement in 1953. While in Kentucky, Hammer was known for designing the official seal of Louisville, which was used until the city's city-county government merger in 2003. He also designed the seal for the University of Louisville, a portrait of Minerva, which has been used since the 1950s (although revised in the 1990s for better reproduction on screens).

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