History

The firm of Joh. Enschedé en Zonen was established in Haarlem (Netherlands) in 1703. It is widely recognized as one of Holland’s finest printing houses. Enschedé prints banknotes and stamps for the Dutch government, fine art catalogues, and commercial high-quality work.

Enschedé started type manufacturing in 1743 after purchasing the foundry of Hendrik Wetstein. From its early years the typefoundry was the most important part of Enschedé’s business. The famous punchcutter Joan Michael Fleischman was employed there in the eighteenth century. Its type business flourished throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in the twentieth century the foundry achieved widespread international acclaim through the design and production of types by Sjoerd H. de Roos and Jan van Krimpen. In 1978, to celebrate their 275th anniversary, Enschedé commissioned Bram de Does, one of Holland’s leading typographers, to design a typeface specifically for phototypesetting. The result was Trinité, a face which clearly shows its provenance and which continues the tradition of type design established at Enschedé so many years before.

In 1991 Peter Matthias Noordzij established The Enschedé Font Foundry. His high standards of design and craftsmanship, his wide technical expertise, and his established skill as a type designer, made him ideally placed to continue Enschedé’s tradition of high-quality type design and manufacture using contemporary technology. He soon made Trinité available in the PostScript font format, and this was followed by Lexicon (1992) also by Bram de Does. Renard, by Fred Smeijers, based on the types of Hendrik van den Keere followed. Ruse, by Peter Matthias’s father, Gerrit Noordzij, and Collis, by his brother Christoph Noordzij were released in 2000.

Besides selling well designed and original typefaces to the general public, The Enschedé Font Foundry also does commissioned work on type, so called custom fonts.