In 1980, Peter Malutzki, Heidi Hübner-Prochotta, and Manfred Prochotta founded the FlugBlatt-Presse in Lahnstein and Mainz and began producing broadsheets, which they called FlugBlätter and which also gave their press its name. They were mostly woodcuts or linocuts, combined with hand-set typography. When they finished the series in 1984 there were 67 FlugBlätter. During a Frankfurt Book Fair in the 1980s collector Rob Saunders acquired FlugBlatt No. 37 along with other prints. Later they became part of Letterform Archive, a nonprofit museum and special collections library in San Francisco, which Saunders founded in 2014.
In 2021, Letterform Archive posted the FlugBlatt No. 37 on social media, where type designer Lena Schmidt saw it, immediately fell in love with it, and developed the plan to bring it into the digital world. After contacting Peter Malutzki – who is still working as a book artist today – and in close consultation with him, Schmidt translated the letterforms into a font series, Malutzki Initials.