Paul Renner’s Futura was sold in France as Europe. The Bauer Foundry cast spe­cial sorts for this mar­ket: just the lower case a in a shape that evokes Car­olin­gian minus­cles. It is amaz­ing how just this one small change affects the look of the whole page. The page shown uses the alter­nate “French” a in its upper half, and the nor­mal a in the bot­tom half. Posters by A. M. Cas­san­dre were very well know in France dur­ing the 20s and cer­tainly influ­enced all other design­ers. This lit­tle change in Futura suits that style per­fectly. The com­mer­cial suc­cess of a type­face can depend on a change as sub­tle as this. The spec­i­men is from a book about Paul Ren­ner, pub­lished as an annual keep­sake by the Typo­graph­i­cal Soci­ety in Munich, pub­lished and edited by Philipp Luidl, assisted by Gün­ter Ger­hard Lange.