Bruta Woodcut

An alphabet originally carved in wood

The German term for characters or letters is “Buchstaben,” literally “Buche” (beech) and “Stab” (rod or stick), and dates back to the Germanic custom of carving runic characters in beechwood sticks. On New Year’s Eve, 2014, I used the occasion to cut “real beech characters” myself. I carved all the characters of this font in woodcarving manner, without tracing and mirror-inverted, in smoothly planed beech rods. After printing on paper, the digital font you see here was created from the negative typeface.