Elephant trunk (typography)

Elephant trunk (green) in letters from the whale tree fracture

In palaeography and in printer's language, an elephant's trunk is the name given to sweeping swellings of capital letters. They appear in late medieval documents and manuscripts that are written in the Bastarda font , as well as in letterpress in Fraktur .

The elephant's trunk is a curved, s-shaped, curved decorative element that is attached to the top left of some capital letters (A, B, J, M, N, P, R, T, V, W, Z) and to the right of the L . The upswing of the trunk originated in Bohemia and is attested to in the Imperial Chancellery from the late 14th century, at a time when the kings of Bohemia also ruled in the Roman-German Empire. This style element was later adopted from Fraktur (see Theuerdank ).

literature

• Hans A. Genzsch: Calligraphic stylistic features in the script of the Luxembourg-Habsburg Imperial Chancellery. In: Communications from the Austrian Institute for Historical Research 45, 1931, pp. 205–214