Hans Garte

Carl Hans Garte (born January 2, 1882 in Leipzig , † 1960 ) was a pioneer of offset printing in Germany.

Live and act

Carl Hans Garte is the son of Carl August Garte, the founder of the Glaser & Garte Kunstverlagshandlung in Leipzig , later Carl August Garte, an art publishing company, lithographic institute and printer .

Hans Garte completed an apprenticeship as a lithographer and then went to the USA for two years, from 1903 to 1905, where he worked as a printer in Brooklyn. He gained valuable experience and expanded his technical knowledge. After returning to Leipzig, he implemented new processes in his father's art publishing company and closely followed the progress made in offset printing in the USA and subsequently in Germany.

On the occasion of the BUGRA International Exhibition for Book Trade and Graphics , which was held for the first time in Germany's leading book city of Leipzig in 1914 , Hans Garte had Schmiers, Werner and Stein build a flat printing machine called Rubens , in which a cylinder covered with a rubber blanket was integrated and in which a zinc plate replaced the stone. In the years after the First World War, offset finally established itself as a printing process in the field of commercial printing for colored mass print runs such as postcards, advertising, packaging, labels and brands, not least due to the boom in the postcard and advertising industry. The postcard publisher Gebrüder Metz in Tübingen, for example, was an important customer at the time.

From 1924, Hans Garte published the trade journal Offset- Buch- und Werbekunst , which was published from 1936 to 1944 under the title Printing and Advertising Art . Up until his death in 1960, Garte maintained contact with many printing companies throughout Germany, to whom he stood by as an “offset pope” in an advisory capacity when it came to questions of quality improvement or profitability. Gartes' correspondence with many printing houses that has survived is evidence of these activities.

The Garte publishing house stayed in Leipzig until after the Second World War. In 1946 Hans Garte supported the reconstruction of the German printing industry in West Germany and relocated the company headquarters there. Hans Garte's son took over the management of the publishing house.

In the 1950s, Hans Garte was promoted to managing director of the flat printing division within the framework of the working group of graphic associations. In addition, he devoted himself to collecting print samples and advertising material from many printing companies. However, until his death in 1960, Garte was no longer able to realize his goal of writing a history of flat and offset printing.

Traveling exhibition

Hans Garte put together a collection of several thousand sheets of sample and test prints, which will enable posterity to tell the story of early offset printing in an exhibition. The main focus of his collection was in the field of commercial printing : decals, book covers, brochures, maps, sheet music, collector's pictures, playing cards and much more.

literature

• Hans Garte: Bibliography of the history of lithography and the specialist books of flat printing . Frankfurt am Main 1958.
• Hans Garte: Offset printing in the USA . Radebeul: paint factories O. Baer, ​​1938.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Pioneer of offset printing - The Garte Collection ( Memento from September 12, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
2. ↑ The incunabula of offset printing - The Garte Collection
3. ^ The Garte Collection - Exhibition from July 2, 2011 to August 28, 2011 in the German Newspaper Museum
4. ↑ The International Senefelder Foundation presents its unique "Garden Collection". ( Memento of the original from October 21, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.