serif
In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ...
typeface
A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
There are list of type ...
s, named for sixteenth-century
Paris
Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...
ian engraver
Claude Garamond
Claude Garamont (–1561), known commonly as Claude Garamond, was a French type designer, publisher and punch-cutter based in Paris. Garamond worked as an engraver of punches, the masters used to stamp matrices, the moulds used to cast metal ty ...
, generally spelled as Garamont in his lifetime. Garamond-style typefaces are popular and particularly often used for book printing and
body text
__NOTOC__
The body text or body copy is the text forming the main content of a book, magazine, web page, or any other printed or digital work. This is as a contrast to both additional components such as headings, images, charts, footnotes etc. on ...
.
Garamond's types followed the model of an influential typeface cut for Venetian printer
Aldus Manutius
Aldus Pius Manutius (; it, Aldo Pio Manuzio; 6 February 1515) was an Italian printer and humanist who founded the Aldine Press. Manutius devoted the later part of his life to publishing and disseminating rare texts. His interest in and preserv ...
by his punchcutter
Francesco Griffo Francesco Griffo (1450–1518), also called Francesco da Bologna, was a fifteenth-century Italian punchcutter. He worked for Aldus Manutius, designing the printer's more important humanist typefaces, including the first italic type. He cut Roman, Gr ...
in 1495, and are in what is now called the old-style of serif letter design, letters with a relatively organic structure resembling
handwriting
Handwriting is the writing done with a writing instrument, such as a pen or pencil, in the hand. Handwriting includes both printing and cursive styles and is separate from formal calligraphy or typeface
A typeface (or font family) is ...
with a
pen
A pen is a common writing instrument that applies ink to a surface, usually paper, for writing or drawing. Early pens such as reed pens, quill pens, dip pens and ruling pens held a small amount of ink on a nib or in a small void or cavity whic ...
, but with a slightly more structured, upright design.
Following an eclipse in popularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, many modern revival faces in the Garamond style have been developed. It is common to pair these with
italics
In typography, italic type is a cursive font based on a stylised form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, italics normally slant slightly to the right. Italics are a way to emphasise key points in a printed tex ...
based on those created by his contemporary
Robert Granjon
Robert Granjon (1513-November 16, 1589/March 1590) was a French type designer and printer. He worked in Paris, Lyon, Frankfurt, Antwerp, and Rome for various printers. He is best known for having introduced the typeface Civilité and for his ital ...
, who was well known for his proficiency in this genre. However, although Garamond himself remains considered a major figure in French printing of the sixteenth century, historical research has increasingly placed him in context as one artisan punchcutter among many active at a time of rapid production of new typefaces in sixteenth-century France, and research has only slowly developed into which fonts were cut by him and which by contemporaries;
Robert Bringhurst
Robert Bringhurst Appointments to the Order of Canada (2013). (born 16 October 1946) is a Canadian poet, typographer and author. He has translated substantial works from Haida and Navajo and from classical Greek and Arabic. He wrote ''The Eleme ...
commented that "it was a widespread custom for many years to attribute almost any good sixteenth-century French font" to Garamond. As a result, while "Garamond" is a common term in the printing industry, the terms "French Renaissance antiqua" and "
Garalde
In typography, the Vox-ATypI classification makes it possible to classify typefaces into general classes. Devised by Maximilien Vox in 1954, it was adopted in 1962 by the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) and in 1967 as a British Sta ...
" have been used in academic writing to refer generally to fonts on the Aldus-French Renaissance model by Garamond and others.
In particular, many 'Garamond' revivals of the early twentieth century are actually based on the work of a later punchcutter,
Jean Jannon
Jean Jannon (died 20 December 1658) was a French Protestant printer, type designer, Punchcutting, punchcutter and typefounder active in Sedan, Ardennes, Sedan in the seventeenth century. He was a reasonably prolific printer by contemporary standa ...
, whose noticeably different work was for some years misattributed to Garamond. The most common digital font named Garamond is
Monotype Garamond
Garamond is a group of many serif typefaces, named for sixteenth-century Parisian engraver Claude Garamond, generally spelled as Garamont in his lifetime. Garamond-style typefaces are popular and particularly often used for book printing and bo ...
. Developed in the early 1920s and bundled with
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketin ...
, it is a revival of Jannon's work.
Characteristics
Some distinctive characteristics in Garamond's letterforms are an 'e' with a small eye and the bowl of the 'a' which has a sharp turn at top left. Other general features are limited but clear stroke contrast and capital letters on the model of
Roman square capitals
Roman square capitals, also called ''capitalis monumentalis'', inscriptional capitals, elegant capitals and ''capitalis quadrata'', are an ancient Roman form of writing, and the basis for modern capital letters. Square capitals are characterize ...
. The 'M' is slightly splayed with outward-facing serifs at the top (sometimes only on the left) and the leg of the 'R' extends outwards from the letter. The
x-height
upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography
In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the let ...
(height of lower-case letters) is low, especially at larger sizes, making the capitals large relative to the lower case, while the top serifs on the ascenders of letters like 'd' have a downward slope and ride above the
cap height
In typography, cap height is the height of a capital letter above the baseline for a particular typeface.http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net/glossary.html Glossary of (some) Typographic Terms It specifically is the height of capital letters that are f ...
. The axis of letters like the ‘o’ is diagonal and the bottom right of the italic 'h' bends inwards. Garamond types have quite expansive ascenders and descenders; printers at the time did not use
leading
In typography, leading ( ) is the space between adjacent lines of type; the exact definition varies.
In hand typesetting, leading is the thin strips of lead (or aluminium) that were inserted between lines of type in the composing stick to incre ...
.
Besides general characteristics, writers on type have generally praised the even quality of Garamond's type:
John A. Lane
John A. Lane (b. 1955) is an American writer and historian of printing living in the Netherlands. Lane received the 2003 Fellowship of the American Printing History Association and is particularly known for his writing on Dutch printing history an ...
describes his work as "elegant and executed with consummate skill...to a higher standard than commercial interest demanded";
H. D. L. Vervliet
Hendrik Désiré Louis 'Dis' Vervliet (Antwerp, 31 December 1923 – August 2020) was a Belgium, Belgian librarian and historian of books and printing.
Life
Vervliet was born into a working-class family and received a doctorate in classical ...
wrote that in his later ''Gros-Canon'' and ''Parangonne'' types (meaning sizes of around 40pt and 18pt respectively) he had achieved "a culmination of Renaissance design. The elegant line and subdued emphasis show the classic search for silent and transparent form".
Modern Garamond revivals also often add a matching
bold
In typography, emphasis is the strengthening of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text, to highlight them. It is the equivalent of prosody stress in speech.
Methods and use
The most common methods in W ...
and 'lining' numbers at the height of capital letters, neither of which were used during the Renaissance; Arabic numerals in Garamond's time were engraved as what are now called
text figures
Text figures (also known as non-lining, lowercase, old style, ranging, hanging, medieval, billing, or antique figures or numerals) are numerals designed with varying heights in a fashion that resembles a typical line of running text, hence the ...
, styled with variable height like lower-case letters.
History
Garamond’s life and his roman type
Garamond worked as an engraver of punches, the masters used to stamp
matrices
Matrix most commonly refers to:
* ''The Matrix'' (franchise), an American media franchise
** ''The Matrix'', a 1999 science-fiction action film
** "The Matrix", a fictional setting, a virtual reality environment, within ''The Matrix'' (franchis ...
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
. In the period of Garamond's early life roman type had been displacing the
blackletter
Blackletter (sometimes black letter), also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for the Danish, Norweg ...
or Gothic type which was used in some (although not all) early French printing. Though his name was generally written as 'Garamont' in his lifetime, the spelling 'Garamond' became the most commonly used form after his death. H. D. L. Vervliet, the leading contemporary expert on French Renaissance printing, uses Garamont consistently.
The roman designs of Garamond which are his most imitated were based on a font cut around 1495 for the Venetian printer
Aldus Manutius
Aldus Pius Manutius (; it, Aldo Pio Manuzio; 6 February 1515) was an Italian printer and humanist who founded the Aldine Press. Manutius devoted the later part of his life to publishing and disseminating rare texts. His interest in and preserv ...
by engraver
Francesco Griffo Francesco Griffo (1450–1518), also called Francesco da Bologna, was a fifteenth-century Italian punchcutter. He worked for Aldus Manutius, designing the printer's more important humanist typefaces, including the first italic type. He cut Roman, Gr ...
. This was first used in the book ''De Aetna'', a short work by poet and cleric
Pietro Bembo
Pietro Bembo, ( la, Petrus Bembus; 20 May 1470 – 18 January 1547) was an Italian scholar, poet, and literary theorist who also was a member of the Knights Hospitaller, and a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. As an intellectual of the It ...
which was Manutius' first printing in the Latin alphabet. Historian
Beatrice Warde
Beatrice Lamberton Warde (September 20, 1900 – September 16, 1969, née Beatrice Becker) was a twentieth-century writer and scholar of typography. As a marketing manager for the British Monotype Corporation, she was influential in the deve ...
has assessed ''De Aetna'' as something of a
pilot project
A pilot study, pilot project, pilot test, or pilot experiment is a small-scale preliminary study conducted to evaluate feasibility, duration, cost, adverse events, and improve upon the study design prior to performance of a full-scale research pro ...
, a small book printed to a higher standard than Manutius' norm. Among other details, this font popularised the idea that in printing the cross-stroke of the 'e' should be level instead of slanting upwards to the right like handwriting, something imitated in almost all type designs since. French typefounders of the 16th century assiduously examined Manutius's work (and, it is thought, ''De Aetna'' in particular) as a source of inspiration: Garamond's roman, italic and greek typefaces were all influenced by types used by Manutius.
An event which was to particularly define the course of the rest of Garamond's career came starting on 6 September 1530, when the printer
Robert Estienne
The name Robert is an ancient Germanic given name, from Proto-Germanic "fame" and "bright" (''Hrōþiberhtaz''). Compare Old Dutch ''Robrecht'' and Old High German ''Hrodebert'' (a compound of '' Hruod'' ( non, Hróðr) "fame, glory, honou ...
began to introduce a set of three roman types adapting the single roman type used in ''De Aetna'' to a range of sizes. These typefaces, with their "light colour and precise cut" were extremely influential and other Parisian printers immediately introduced copies. The largest size "Gros-canon" (42.5pt) particularly became a "phenomenon" in Paris: never before had a roman type been cut in so large a size. The designs copied Manutius's type even to the extent of copying the 'M' shown in ''De Aetna'' which, whether intentionally or due to a casting defect, had no serif pointing out of the letter at top right. This form was to appear in many fonts of the period, including Garamond's earlier ones, although by the end of his career he had switched to mostly using an M on the Roman capital model with a serif at top right.
The period from 1520 to around 1560, encompassing Garamond's career, was an extremely busy period for typeface creation. Many fonts were cut, some such as Robert Estienne's for a single printer's exclusive use, others sold or traded between them (increasingly over time). The many active engravers included Garamond himself, Granjon,
Guillaume Le Bé
Guillaume Le Bé (; 1525–1598) was a French punchcutter and engraver who specialised in Hebrew typefaces.
He was born in Troyes to a notable family of paper merchants and apprenticed to Robert Estienne in Paris. After completing his apprenti ...
, particularly respected for his Hebrew fonts,
Pierre Haultin
Pierre Haultin (c. 1510 – 1587) was a French printer, publisher, punchcutter and typefounder.
He was the nephew of the famous Parisian women printer Charlotte Guillard. As a punchcutter, he may have been trained by Claude Garamont, who wo ...
,
Antoine Augereau Antoine Augereau (1485-1534) was a Renaissance printer, bookseller and punchcutter in Paris. He was one of the first French punchcutters to produce Roman type, at a time where other French printers were mostly using blackletter. He worked for Robert ...
(who may have been Garamond's master), Estienne's stepfather
Simon de Colines
Simon de Colines (c. 14801546) was a Parisian printer and one of the first printers of the French Renaissance. He was active in Paris as a printer and worked exclusively for the University of Paris from 1520 to 1546. In addition to his work as a ...
and others. This period saw the creation of a pool of high-quality punches and matrices, many of which would remain used for the next two centuries.
Little is known about Garamond's life or work before 1540, although he wrote in a preface of having cut punches for type since childhood. He worked for a variety of employers on commission, creating punches and selling matrices to publishers and the government. Garamond's typefaces were popular abroad, and replaced Griffo's original roman type at the
Aldine Press
The Aldine Press was the printing office started by Aldus Manutius in 1494 in Venice, from which were issued the celebrated Aldine editions of the classics (Latin and Greek masterpieces, plus a few more modern works). The first book that was dat ...
in Venice. He also worked as a publisher and bookseller. By 1549, a document from theologian Jean de Gagny specified that the goldsmith Charles Chiffin, who had cut an italic for his private printing press, should receive payment at the rate of "the best punchcutter in this city after master Claude Garamont", clearly showing that he was considered the pre-eminent punchcutter in Paris at this time.
Vervliet concludes that Garamond created thirty-four typefaces for which an attribution can be confidently made (17 roman, 7 italic, 8 Greek, 2 Hebrew) and another three for which the attribution is problematic (one each of roman, Greek and Hebrew). If Garamond distributed specimens of his typefaces, as later punchcutters and typefounders did, none is known to survive, although one unsigned specimen in the Plantin-Moretus Museum collection, presenting a synopsis of his late ''Parangon'' type, may have been made around the time of his death or soon after.
While some records such as
Christophe Plantin
Christophe Plantin ( nl, Christoffel Plantijn; – 1 July 1589) was a French Renaissance humanist and book printer and publisher who resided and worked in Antwerp.
Life
Plantin was born in France, probably in Saint-Avertin, near the city of ...
's exist of what exact types were cut by Garamond himself, many details of his career remain uncertain: early estimates placed Garamond's date of birth around 1480, but modern opinion proposes much later estimates. A document called the Le Bé Memorandum (based on the memories of Guillaume Le Bé, but collated by one of his sons around 1643) suggests that Garamond finished his apprenticeship around 1510. This is considered unlikely by modern historians since his mother was still alive when he died in 1561 and little is known of him before around 1540.
One particular question about Garamond's early career is whether he cut the typefaces used by Estienne from 1530. Because of Garamond's known connection with Estienne in his later career, it has been assumed that he cut them, but this was not mentioned in contemporary sources: Vervliet suggests that these 'Estienne typefaces' were not cut by Garamond and that his career began somewhat later. Vervliet suggests that the creator of this set of typefaces, sometimes called the 'Estienne Master', may have been a 'Master Constantin', recorded in the Le Bé Memorandum as a master type engraver of the period before Garamond but about whom nothing is otherwise known and to whom no obvious other body of work can be ascribed. If so, his disappearance from history (perhaps due to an early death, since all his presumed work appeared in just four years from 1530 to 1533) and the execution of Augereau on a charge of heresy in 1534 may have allowed Garamond's reputation to develop in the following decade.
Regardless of these questions about his early career, Garamond's late career is well-recorded, with most of his later roman types (in Lane's view, his best work) preserved in complete sets of matrices at the Museum Plantin-Moretus, which has allowed example sets of characters to be cast, with further documentation and attributions from later inventories and specimen sheets. Of the Garamond types preserved, all include
small capitals
In typography, small caps (short for "small capitals") are grapheme, characters typeset with glyphs that resemble letter case, uppercase letters (capitals) but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding letter case, lowercase letters ...
apart from the ''gros-canon'', and the ''parangonne'' uniquely includes terminal swash forms for a e m n r t (two forms) and z.
Italics
Garamond cut more roman types than italics, which at the time were conceived separately to roman types rather than designed alongside them as complementary matches.
Italics had again been introduced by Manutius in 1500; the first was cut by Griffo. This first italic used upright capitals, copying a popular style of calligraphy. The modern italic style of sloped capitals first appeared in 1527 and only slowly became popular. Accordingly, many of Garamond's italics were quite small and had upright capitals. Some of his italics did have sloped capitals, although Vervliet did not feel he integrated them effectively into the typeface design, "sloped capitals were (and stayed) a weakness in his designs."
Garamond's italics were apparently not as used as widely as Granjon's and Haultin's, which spread widely across Europe. For example, on the 1592 Berner specimen, most of the romans were by Garamond but at least all but one, and probably all, of the italics are Granjon's. Similarly in the 1643 ''Imprimerie royale'' specimen, most of the italics are Granjon's. (Some books published by Garamond in 1545 use a very common italic of the period, not cut by him.)
Greek
Garamond cut type for the Greek alphabet from the beginning of his recorded career: on 2 November 1540 he contracted to cut a series of Greek faces for the French government, to be used in printing by Robert Estienne. The resulting typeface, known as the ''
Grecs du roi
''Les grecs du roi'' (lit. "the king's greeks") are a celebrated and influential Greek typeface cut by the French punchcutter Claude Garamond between 1541 and 1550. Arthur Tilley calls the books printed from them "among the most finished specim ...
'', are very different from his Latin designs: again influenced by Greek typefaces used by Manutius (they were cut in three sizes, the same ones Manutius used), they were based on the elegant handwriting of
Cretan
Crete ( el, Κρήτη, translit=, Modern: , Ancient: ) is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the 88th largest island in the world and the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily, Sardinia, Cyprus, and ...
scribe
Angelo Vergecio
Angelo Vergecio ( el, Άγγελος Βεργέκιος, french: Ange Vergèce; 1505–1569) was a Greek copyist from Crete active in Venice and France. He became a royal scribe for Francis I of France and his successors, was responsible for copyi ...
, who used many ligatures and traditional contractions in his writing, and include a extraordinarily large number of alternate characters to faithfully replicate it. Arthur Tilley called the books printed from them "among the most finished specimens of typography that exist".
The ''Grecs du roi'' punches and matrices remain the property of the French government. They were extremely influential and directly copied by many engravers for other printers, becoming the basis of Greek typeface design for the next two centuries.
Although the ''Grecs du roi'' style was popular in Greek printing for the next two centuries, it is problematic for modern setting of body text, due to changing tastes in Greek printing: they are slanted, but modern Greek printing often uses upright type, and because Garamond's types were designed assuming that ligatures would be manually selected and inserted wherever needed; later metal types on the same model used fewer ligatures. Digital 'Garamond' releases such as Adobe's with Roman and Greek character sets often re-interpret the Greek, for instance with upright characters. A commercial digitisation from Anagrafi Fonts, ''KS GrequeX'', uses the
OpenType
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark o ...
format to include over 1100 abbreviations and ligatures, more than Garamond cut.
According to Lane the most influential ''Grecs du roi'' copies were those of Granjon and Haultin, but others may have been cut by Jean Arnould and Nicolas de Villiers, amongst others. Another was made by Arthur Nicholls in London.
After Garamond's death
Garamond died in 1561 and his punches and matrices were sold off by his widow. Purchasers included the Le Bé type foundry in Paris run by the family of Guillaume Le Bé and Christophe Plantin, who was in Paris at the time; the Frankfurt foundry often referred to by historians as Egenolff-Berner also came to acquire materials of Garamond's. Le Bé's son is known to have written to Plantin's successor Moretus offering to trade matrices so they could both have complementary type in a range of sizes. Konrad Berner showcased various types of Garamond's and other French engravers in a 1592 specimen, which named the types' engravers and would later be a source for historians.
Plantin's collection of original Garamond punches and matrices survives at the
Plantin-Moretus Museum
The Plantin-Moretus Museum ( nl, Plantin-Moretusmuseum) is a printing museum in Antwerp, Belgium which focuses on the work of the 16th-century printers Christophe Plantin and Jan Moretus. It is located in their former residence and printing establ ...
in Antwerp, together with many other typefaces collected by Plantin from other typefounders of the period. The collection has been used extensively for research, for example by historians Harry Carter and Vervliet. Plantin also commissioned punchcutter
Robert Granjon
Robert Granjon (1513-November 16, 1589/March 1590) was a French type designer and printer. He worked in Paris, Lyon, Frankfurt, Antwerp, and Rome for various printers. He is best known for having introduced the typeface Civilité and for his ital ...
to create alternate characters for three Garamond fonts with shortened ascenders and descenders to allow tighter linespacing.
Garamond's name was used outside France as a name for 10pt type, often in Dutch as 'Garmond'.
Robert Granjon
Many modern revival fonts based on French renaissance printing are influenced by the work of Robert Granjon (c. 1513-90), particularly in italic. An engraver with a long and wide-ranging career, Granjon's work seems to have ranged much more widely than Garamond's focus on roman and Greek type, cutting type in italic, civilité (a cursive blackletter), and for the Vatican type in exotic alphabets including Arabic, Armenian and Hebrew. His career also took in stops in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and finally for the last twelve years of his life Rome, where he ended his career in the service of the Vatican.
Vervliet comments that Granjon "laid the foundation for our image of the way an Italic should look." Although he was not quite the first designer to use the idea of italics having capitals sloped to complement the roman, he "solved successfully the problem of a balanced inclination of the capitals, a feature much ahead of the designs with a more irregular slope of his Viennese and Mainz predecessors...and even compared to...Garamont. A proper optical harmony of the angle of slope is characteristic for all Granjon’s Italics; it allowed the compositor to use whole lines of capitals without causing too much giddiness." Granjon also cut many
swash capitals
A swash is a typography, typographical flourish, such as an exaggerated serif, terminal, tail, entry stroke, etc., on a glyph.
The use of swash characters dates back to at least the 16th century, as they can be seen in Ludovico Vicentino degli A ...
, which Vervliet describes as "deliciously daring" and have often been copied, for instance in Robert Slimbach's revivals for Adobe (discussed below).
Other French engravers of the sixteenth century
Besides Garamond, Granjon and the "Estienne master", other engravers were active in the French renaissance style.
Pierre Haultin particularly created many types which were very popular and distributed very widely around Europe: as a Protestant, he spent much of his career outside Paris working in
Geneva
Geneva ( ; french: Genève ) frp, Genèva ; german: link=no, Genf ; it, Ginevra ; rm, Genevra is the List of cities in Switzerland, second-most populous city in Switzerland (after Zürich) and the most populous city of Romandy, the French-speaki ...
,
Lyons
Lyon,, ; Occitan: ''Lion'', hist. ''Lionés'' also spelled in English as Lyons, is the third-largest city and second-largest metropolitan area of France. It is located at the confluence of the rivers Rhône and Saône, to the northwest of th ...
and
La Rochelle
La Rochelle (, , ; Poitevin-Saintongeais: ''La Rochéle''; oc, La Rochèla ) is a city on the west coast of France and a seaport on the Bay of Biscay, a part of the Atlantic Ocean. It is the capital of the Charente-Maritime department. With ...
and his nephew Jérôme established a career importing and casting his types in London, where his types were extremely common. In Carter's view Haultin "has been greatly underrated". Another engraver whose types were very popular in London was François Guyot, who moved from Paris to Antwerp and then London.
Jean Jannon
In 1621, sixty years after Garamond's death, the French printer
Jean Jannon
Jean Jannon (died 20 December 1658) was a French Protestant printer, type designer, Punchcutting, punchcutter and typefounder active in Sedan, Ardennes, Sedan in the seventeenth century. He was a reasonably prolific printer by contemporary standa ...
released a specimen of typefaces in the Garamond/Granjon style. Jannon wrote in his specimen that:
Seeing that for some time many persons have had to do with the art
f printing
F, or f, is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''ef'' (pronounced ), and the plural is ''efs''.
Hist ...
who have greatly lowered it ... the desire came upon me to try if I might imitate, after some fashion, some one among those who honourably busied themselves with the art, en whose deathsI hear regretted every day annon mentions some eminent printers of the previous centurynbsp;... and inasmuch as I could not accomplish this design for lack of types which I needed ... ome typefounderswould not, and others could not furnish me with what I lacked oI resolved, about six years ago, to turn my hand in good earnest to the making of punches, matrices and moulds for all sorts of characters, for the accommodation both of the public and of myself.
Jannon was a Protestant in mostly Catholic France. After apparently working with the Estienne family in Paris he set up an independent career as printer in Sedan in what is now north-eastern France, becoming printer for the Protestant
Academy
An academy ( Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary or tertiary higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membership). The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy ...
. By his report he took up punchcutting seriously in his thirties, although according to Williamson he would have cut decorative material and engravings at least before this. Sedan the time enjoyed an unstable independence as a
principality
A principality (or sometimes princedom) can either be a monarchical feudatory or a sovereign state, ruled or reigned over by a regnant-monarch with the title of prince and/or princess, or by a monarch with another title considered to fall under ...
at a time when the French government had conceded through the
Edict of Nantes
The Edict of Nantes () was signed in April 1598 by King Henry IV and granted the Calvinist Protestants of France, also known as Huguenots, substantial rights in the nation, which was in essence completely Catholic. In the edict, Henry aimed pr ...
to allowing a complicated system of restricted liberties for Protestants.
The French Royal Printing Office (Imprimerie Royale) appears to have bought matrices from him in 1641 in three large sizes, roman and italic at roughly 18, 24 and 36 point sizes. (The contract is actually made for one 'Nicholas Jannon', which historians have concluded to be a mistake.) Despite the purchase, it is not clear that the office ever much used Jannon's type: historian
James Mosley
James Mosley (born 1935) is a retired librarian and historian whose work has specialised in the history of printing and letter design.
The main part of Mosley's career has been 42 years as Librarian of the St Bride Printing Library in London, wher ...
has reported being unable to find books printed by the Imprimerie that use more than two sizes of italic. His type would later be misattributed to Garamond. Despite this, it is known that authorities in 1644 raided an office in
Caen
Caen (, ; nrf, Kaem) is a commune in northwestern France. It is the prefecture of the department of Calvados. The city proper has 105,512 inhabitants (), while its functional urban area has 470,000, Warde initially assumed that this was the source of the Jannon materials in the Imprimerie Nationale before the government's purchase order came to light. Jannon's types and their descendants are recognizable by the scooped-out triangular serifs on the top left of such characters as 'm', 'n' and 'r', which curve to a steeper slant in Jannon's design compared to Garamond's. The italics are also very different from Garamond's own or Granjon's, being much more ornate and with considerable variation in angle of the capitals. Opinions of Jannon's engraving quality have varied; Warde found them "so technically brilliant as to be decadent" and "of slight value as a book face" (the surviving Jannon sizes were intended as display faces, cut at 18pt or larger) and Vervliet described them as "famous not so much for the quality of the design but as for the long-term confusion it created", although many reproductions of his work were successful in printing in the twentieth century. Jannon cut far more types than those surviving in the Imprimerie collection: before the misattribution to Garamond, he was particularly respected for his engraving of an extremely small size of type, known for his workplace as ''sédanoise'', which was popular.
By the nineteenth century, Jannon's matrices had come to be known as the ''Caractères de l'Université'' (Characters of the University). It has sometimes been claimed that this term was an official name designated for the Jannon type by
Cardinal Richelieu
Armand Jean du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu (; 9 September 1585 – 4 December 1642), known as Cardinal Richelieu, was a French clergyman and statesman. He was also known as ''l'Éminence rouge'', or "the Red Eminence", a term derived from the ...
, while Warde in 1926 more plausibly suggested it might be a garbled recollection of Jannon's work with the Sedan Academy, which operated much like a university despite not using the name. Carter in the 1970s followed this conclusion. Mosley, however, concludes that no report of the term (or much use of Jannon's matrices at all) exists before the nineteenth century, and it may originate from a generic term of the eighteenth century simply meaning older or more conservative typeface designs, perhaps those preferred in academic publishing.
The fate of Garamond's work
The old-style typefaces of Garamond and his contemporaries continued to be regularly used and kept in the stock of European typefounders until the end of the eighteenth century and appear in the major French type foundry specimen books of the eighteenth century, of Delacolonge, Lamesle, and Gando. In Delacolonge's book, many fonts were shown "mutilated" or as "bastard" fonts: with replacement characters, specifically cut-down descenders to allow tighter linespacing. According to James Mosley French renaissance romans remained popular for slightly longer than italics, due to a taste for new italics, wider and with flat incoming serifs, introduced by the '' Romain du roi'' type and popularised by Simon-Pierre Fournier (see below): "it is common enough, in the second half of the eighteenth century, to find books set in a Garamond roman or a near copy mated with one of Fournier's italics".
A trademark associated with the Garalde style in modern times is the four-terminal 'W', although sixteenth-century French typefaces generally do not include the character as it is not normal in French. Many French renaissance typefaces used abroad had the character added later, along with the 'J' and 'U': these were often very visibly added by lesser craftsmen, producing an obvious mismatch. Granjon added a 'W' and 'w', both with three upper terminals, to Garamond's Breviare roman in 1565 for Plantin.
The foundry of Guillaume Le Bé I which held many of Garamond's punches and matrices passed to Guillaume Le Bé II, and came to be managed by Jean-Claude Fournier, whose son Jean-Pierre in 1730 purchased it. (His younger brother, Simon-Pierre Fournier, rapidly left the family business and became a major exponent of modern ideas in printing, including standardised point sizes and crisp types influenced by contemporary calligraphy.)
In 1756, Jean-Pierre Fournier wrote of his collection of vintage equipment that "I am the owner of the foundry of Garamond, the Le Bé family and Granjon. I shall be happy to display my punches and matrices to all those who are lovers of true beauty ... these are the types that made the reputations of the Estiennes, Plantin and the Elzevirs," and referred to an inventory that he said was in his possession that had been drawn up after Garamond's death in 1561. (The comment was made in a journal during a public dispute with a printer of more modern tastes who preferred to remain anonymous and may have been his younger brother.) The 1561 inventory does not survive, although some later inventories do; by this point Fournier's foundry may have become rather inactive.
Old-style serif typefaces by Garamond and his contemporaries finally fell out of use altogether with the arrival of what is now called the Didone, or modern-face, style of printing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, promoted by the
Didot family
Didot is the name of a family of French printers, punch-cutters and publishers. Through its achievements and advancements in printing, publishing and typography, the family has lent its name to typographic unit, typographic measurements developed ...
in France and others. This favoured a much more geometric, constructed style of letter which could show off the increasingly refined paper and printing technologies of the period. Lane suggests Fournier's type foundry may have finally disposed of its materials around 1805; in contrast, the collections of the Plantin-Moretus Museum survive almost intact. Mosley comments:
The upheavals of the Revolution coincided with the major shift in the style of printing types that is associated with the family of Didot, and the stock of old materials abruptly lost its value, except as scrap. Punches rust, and the copper of matrices is recyclable. All traces of the early types that had been in the hands of the trade typefounders like Le Bé, Sanlecque and Lamesle in Paris vanished completely. No relics of them were saved anywhere, except in commercial centres that had become relative backwaters, like Antwerp, where the Plantin-Moretus printing office piously preserved the collection of its founder ... the term caractères de l'Université became attached by default to the set of apparently early matrices that had survived, its provenance forgotten, in the mixed stock of materials of the national printing-office.
Garamond's reputation remained respected, even by members of the Didot family whose type designs came to dominate French printing.
Revival era
A revival of interest in 'old-style' serif typefaces took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This saw a revival of the Imprimerie royale typefaces (the office was now called the Imprimerie nationale following the end of the French monarchy), which, unlike Garamond's own work, had survived in Paris. The attribution came to be considered certain by the Imprimerie's director Arthur Christian, who commissioned the cutting of additional sizes in a matching style.
Early revivals were often based directly on the Imprimerie nationale types, one of the first by Peignot and then by
American Type Founders
American Type Founders (ATF) Co. was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85% of all type manufactured in the United States. De Vinne, Theodore Low, ''The Practice of Typography,'' Century Comp ...
(ATF).
These revivals could be made using
pantograph
A pantograph (, from their original use for copying writing) is a mechanical linkage connected in a manner based on parallelograms so that the movement of one pen, in tracing an image, produces identical movements in a second pen. If a line dr ...
machine engraving systems, which gave a cleaner result than historic typefaces whose master punches had been hand-carved, and allowed rapid development of a family in a large range of sizes. In addition, the new
hot metal typesetting
In printing and typography, hot metal typesetting (also called mechanical typesetting, hot lead typesetting, hot metal, and hot type) is a technology for typesetting text in letterpress printing. This method injects molten type metal into a mol ...
technology of the period created increasing availability and demand for new fonts. Among hot metal typesetting companies, Monotype's branches in Britain and the United States brought out separate versions, and the American branch of Linotype licensed that of ATF.
A number of historians began in the early twentieth century to question if the Imprimerie nationale Latin-alphabet type was really the work of Garamond, as the ''Grecs du Roi'' undoubtedly were. Doubt was raised by French historian Jean Paillard, but he died during the First World War soon after publishing his conclusions in 1914 and his work remained little-read. ATF's historian
Henry Lewis Bullen
Henry Lewis Bullen (1857 – April 27, 1938) was an American printer and typographic archivist.
Early life
Henry Lewis Bullen was born in 1857 in Ballarat, Australia to American-Scotch parentage. He left school at 14 to become a printers appr ...
secretly doubted that the 'Garamond' his company was reviving was really Garamond's work, noting that he had never seen it in a sixteenth-century book. He discussed his concerns with ATF junior librarian Beatrice Warde, who would later move to Europe and become a prominent writer on printing advising the British branch of Monotype.
In a 1926 paper published on the British typography journal ''
The Fleuron
''The Fleuron'' was a British journal of typography and book arts published in seven volumes from 1923 to 1930. A fleuron is a floral ornament used by typographers.
In 1922 Stanley Morison — the influential typographical advisor to Monotype — ...
'', Beatrice Warde revealed her discovery that the Imprimerie nationale type had been created by Jean Jannon, something she had discovered by examining printing credited to him in London and Paris and through reading the work of Paillard, and perhaps with advice from French bibliographer Marius Audin. (Warde's article was originally published pseudonymously as the work of 'Paul Beaujon', a persona Warde later said she imagined to have a "long grey beard, four grandchildren, a great interest in antique furniture and a rather vague address in Montparesse." Typifying her sense of humour, she reported her conclusions to Morison, a convert to Catholicism, with a telegram beginning "JANNON SPECIMEN SIMPLY GORGEOUS SHOWS ALL SIZES HIS TYPES WERE APPROPRIATED BY RAPACIOUS PAPIST GOVERNMENT ..." She also noted in later life that some of her readers were surprised to see an article supposedly by a Frenchman quoting ''
The Hunting of the Snark
''The Hunting of the Snark'', subtitled ''An Agony in 8 Fits'', is a poem by the English writer Lewis Carroll. It is typically categorised as a nonsense poem. Written between 1874 and 1876, it borrows the setting, some creatures, and eight por ...
''.)
By the time Warde's article was published some revivals had been released that were more authentic revivals of Garamond's work, based on period books and printing specimens. The German company Stempel brought out a crisp revival of the original Garamond typefaces in the 1920s, inspired by a rediscovered specimen from the Egenolff-Berner foundry in Frankfurt, as did Linotype in Britain.
Timeline
The Renaissance
* 1470 – first book printed in France, by a Swiss/German team at the
Sorbonne
Sorbonne may refer to:
* Sorbonne (building), historic building in Paris, which housed the University of Paris and is now shared among multiple universities.
*the University of Paris (c. 1150 – 1970)
*one of its components or linked institution, ...
,
Paris
Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...
. Early books printed in France generally use type of a
blackletter
Blackletter (sometimes black letter), also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for the Danish, Norweg ...
design or roman type with blackletter characteristics.
* 1496 –
Aldus Manutius
Aldus Pius Manutius (; it, Aldo Pio Manuzio; 6 February 1515) was an Italian printer and humanist who founded the Aldine Press. Manutius devoted the later part of his life to publishing and disseminating rare texts. His interest in and preserv ...
publishes ''De Aetna'', a short text of poetry that serves as his first printing in the Latin alphabet. Its roman type sets a standard that would later be imitated by French printers.
Late Renaissance
* 1510 – Garamond may have been born around this time.
* 1530 – Robert Estienne begins to publish in a new and more elegant style of 'roman' type, influenced by ''De Aetna'' with its asymmetrical 'M'.
* 1540 – Garamond first clearly enters the historical record, being advanced money to cut the ''Grecs du Roi'' type.
* 1561 – Death of Garamond.
* 1563 – Christophe Plantin buys matrices and other equipment in Paris at auction, some from Garamond's widow, for his partnership in Antwerp. Other equipment is bought by other Parisian and German printers; a specimen sheet identifying his types is issued by a Frankfurt foundry in 1592.
* 1560–70s – The work of Garamond and his contemporaries becomes very influential in the Low Countries and western Germany. A decline sets into the production of new typefaces, probably mostly due to simple saturation of the market with typefaces of acceptable quality, and possibly also due to economic and religious factors causing the emigration of printers and typefounders to other countries.
Early modern period
* 1580 – birth of Jannon
* 1621 – Jannon issues a specimen of his type.
* 1640 – Jannon leaves Sedan for Paris.
* 1641 – foundation of the Imprimerie Royale, which buys matrices from Jannon
* 1644 – Jannon's printing office in
Caen
Caen (, ; nrf, Kaem) is a commune in northwestern France. It is the prefecture of the department of Calvados. The city proper has 105,512 inhabitants (), while its functional urban area has 470,000,
* 1658 – death of Jannon
Eighteenth century
* 1756 – Parisian printer Jean-Pierre Fournier quotes from the 1561 inventory of Garamond's work and writes about his possession of Garamond's equipment. However, his extensive collections are dispersed after his death in 1783 and ultimately 'traditional' old-style type falls out of use in France around the end of the century.
Early revival era
* Late nineteenth century – revival in interest in 'old-style' typefaces such as the
Caslon
Caslon is the name given to serif typefaces designed by William Caslon I (c. 1692–1766) in London, or inspired by his work.
Caslon worked as an engraver of punches, the masters used to stamp the moulds or matrices used to cast metal ty ...
type (1730s, England) and that of Jenson (1470s, Venice).
* 1912 – revival of the Imprimerie Royale (now Imprimerie nationale, following the revolution) type by the Peignot foundry. A revival by Ollière of "Garamond" type based on photographing sixteenth-century books follows
* 1914 – Jean Paillard writes and Ollière publishes an essay showcasing Ollière's Garamond revival arguing that the Imprimerie nationale type was not created by Garamond but his work attracts little attention. He is killed serving in the First World War a few months later.
* 1920 – a copy of the 1592 Berner specimen of typefaces is published in facsimile.
* 1923 – ATF issue a specimen of their Garamond revival, in development for several years prior. ATF's historian Henry Bullen privately tells
Beatrice Warde
Beatrice Lamberton Warde (September 20, 1900 – September 16, 1969, née Beatrice Becker) was a twentieth-century writer and scholar of typography. As a marketing manager for the British Monotype Corporation, she was influential in the deve ...
, then a junior librarian, that he suspects that Garamond had nothing to do with the type, since he had never seen it in a contemporary book, but has no better candidate for its creator. Warde subsequently moves to Europe, becoming a freelance writer on printing and adviser to Monotype in London.
* 1925 – Based on the Egelhoff-Berner specimen, Stempel Garamond is released in Germany: later also released by Linotype, it is the first Garamond revival actually based on his work.
* 1923 – Monotype Garamond is published based on the Imprimerie nationale type.
* 1926 – Warde discovers and reveals that the Imprimerie nationale type was created by Jannon, and that all revivals based on it are not directly based on Garamond's work.
Contemporary versions
Based on Garamond's design
Stempel Garamond
A 1920s adaptation created by the
Stempel Type Foundry
D. Stempel AG was a German typographic foundry founded by David Stempel (1869–1927), in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Many important font designers worked for the Stempel foundry, including Hans Bohn, Warren Chappell, F. H. Ehmcke, Friedric ...
and released for hot metal typesetting by Linotype, that has remained popular. Its lower case 'a' has a sharp and somewhat angular look with a crisp hook at the top left, in contrast to a teardrop design that is common in many other serif typefaces. Stempel Garamond has relatively short
descender
In typography and handwriting, a descender is the portion of a letter that extends below the baseline of a font.
For example, in the letter ''y'', the descender is the "tail", or that portion of the diagonal line which lies below the ''v'' c ...
s, allowing it to be particularly tightly linespaced. An unusual feature is the digit 0, which has reversed contrast, with the thickest points of the number on the top and bottom of the digit to make it more distinguishable from an 'o'. The
Klingspor Museum
The Klingspor-Museum is a museum in Offenbach, Germany, specializing in the art of modern book production, typography and type. It includes a collection of fine art books from Karl Klingspor, one of the owners of Klingspor Type Foundry in Offe ...
credits it to Stempel's head of typeface development Dr. Rudolf Wolf.
Garamond No. 1 and Garamond No. 2 are both based on Stempel Garamond, with various differences. Another typeface known as Original Garamond is a clone of Stempel Garamond.
= URW++ Garamond No. 8
=
Garamond No. 8 is a freeware version of Stempel Garamond contributed by
URW++
URW Type Foundry GmbH (formerly URW++ Design & Development GmbH) is a type foundry based in Hamburg, Germany. The foundry has its own library with more than 500 font families. The company specializes in customized corporate typefaces and the d ...
to the
Ghostscript
Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization or rendering of such page description language files, ...
project; it was included in GhostScript since Stempel Garamond is included as a system font in some implementations of the
PostScript
PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...
standard. It is distributed under the AFP license, which allows it to be copied freely but not sold. It is understood that its license does not place any restriction on whether the typeface is ''used'' in commercial settings (as long as the typeface is not distributed in situations where a fee is involved), nor whether printed contents created with it are sold. Garamond No. 8 hence does not have a fully open-source license, but its license does not restrict usage for personal purposes or commercial printing.
Featuring a bold weight, small capitals, optional
text figures
Text figures (also known as non-lining, lowercase, old style, ranging, hanging, medieval, billing, or antique figures or numerals) are numerals designed with varying heights in a fashion that resembles a typical line of running text, hence the ...
and automatic ligature insertion, it is particularly popular in the
TeX
Tex may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname
* Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr.
Entertainment
* ''Tex'', the Italian ...
community and is also included on some
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
distributions. Originally released as a PostScript Type 1, it has been converted into the TrueType format, usable by most current software.
Garamond No. 8 is often packaged as "urw-garamond" in the open source communities, but is actually different from another typeface that is simply known as URW Garamond.
Granjon
Granjon was a 1920s revival designed by George W. Jones for the British branch of Linotype, using a 1582 history textbook as a model and also influenced by
Caslon
Caslon is the name given to serif typefaces designed by William Caslon I (c. 1692–1766) in London, or inspired by his work.
Caslon worked as an engraver of punches, the masters used to stamp the moulds or matrices used to cast metal ty ...
. It was the favourite Garalde of many in the twentieth century, including Warde and
Walter Tracy
Walter Valentine Tracy RDI (14 February 1914 – 28 April 1995) was an English type designer, typographer and writer.
Biography
Walter Tracy was born in Islington, London and attended Shoreditch Secondary school. At the age of fourteen he wa ...
.
Jones also created for Linotype Estienne, a delicate revival based on Robert Estienne's fonts of the 1530s discussed above, with very long ascenders and descenders. It was less popular and it has not been officially digitised by Linotype. Williamson suggested that in body text it failed to adapt the style of a large letter effectively down to body text size, giving a design with an extremely small x-height.
Sabon
Sabon is a Garamond revival designed by
Jan Tschichold
Jan Tschichold (born Johannes Tzschichhold, also known as Iwan Tschichold, or Ivan Tschichold; 2 April 1902 – 11 August 1974) was a German calligrapher, typographer and book designer. He played a significant role in the development of gra ...
in 1964, jointly released by Linotype, Monotype and Stempel in 1967. It is named after
Jacques Sabon Jacques Sabon (born in Lyon, 1535; died in Frankfurt-am-Main, ca.1580-1590Sources vary, giving date of death as 1580 or 1590) was a French typefounder. He worked with Christian Egenolff in Frankfurt in 1555 and Christophe Plantin of Antwerp in ...
, a Frankfurt-based printer, who introduced the typefaces of Garamond and his contemporaries to German printing. An unusual feature of many releases of Sabon is that the italic, based on Granjon's work, is wider than most normal italics, at the same width as the roman style. This suited Linotype's hot metal typesetting system. Later Sabon versions, such as
Jean François Porchez
Jean François Porchez () (born in 1964) is a French type designer. He founded the French type foundry Typofonderie in 1994. He was president of ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale), the leading organisation of type designers from 200 ...
's Sabon Next, have not always maintained this principle.
Tschichold stated that Sabon was designed based on the Egenolff-Berner specimen, although there are different accounts on whether it was drawn using the Saint Augusin (around 13pt) or the Parangon (around 18.5pt) models. Porchez and Christopher Burke later researched into Sabon during the development of Sabon Next. They suggested that aspects of Sabon's design may have been copied from a font by Guillaume Le Bé, a large-size specimen of which he had previously reproduced in a textbook. Sabon Next was based on the version of Sabon that was developed for the Stempel metal handsetting system, along with designs of other unspecified Garamond models.
Berthold Garamond
A 1972 revival for
phototypesetting
Phototypesetting is a method of setting type. It uses photography to make columns of type on a scroll of photographic paper.
It has been made obsolete by the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publishing (digital typesetting).
Th ...
Günter Gerhard Lange
Günter Gerhard Lange (12 April 1921, in Frankfurt (Oder) – 2 December 2008, in Grosshesselohe Isartal station, Großhesselohe near Munich) was a German typographer, teacher and type designer.
He was longtime art director of Berthold Type Foundr ...
.
URW Garamond (which is different from URW Garamond No. 8 mentioned above, despite the latter is often packaged as "urw-garamond" in open source software) is a clone of Berthold Garamond.
Adobe Garamond
Released in 1989, Adobe Garamond is designed by
Robert Slimbach
Robert Joseph Slimbach is Principal Type Designer at Adobe, Inc., where he has worked since 1987. He has won many awards for his digital typeface designs, including the rarely awarded Prix Charles Peignot from the Association Typographique Inter ...
for
Adobe Systems
Adobe Inc. ( ), originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware
and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the crea ...
following a research visit to the Plantin-Moretus Museum, based on a Roman type by Garamond and an italic type by Robert Granjon. The font family has 3 weights (Regular, Semibold, and Bold), each with its respective italic, totalling 6 styles. Its quite even, mature design attracted attention on release for its authenticity, in contrast to the much more aggressive
ITC Garamond
Garamond is a group of many serif typefaces, named for sixteenth-century Parisian engraver Claude Garamond, generally spelled as Garamont in his lifetime. Garamond-style typefaces are popular and particularly often used for book printing and bo ...
popular at the time. It is one of the most popular versions of Garamond in books and fine printing. Slimbach decided not to base the design directly on Garamond types in the 9–15pt sizes normally used for book text, but on a larger type called ''parangonne'' or ''vraye parangonne'', which he felt was Garamond's "most attractive work". It was reviewed by
Hugh Williamson
Hugh Williamson (December 5, 1735 – May 22, 1819) was an American Founding Fathers of the United States, Founding Father, physician, and politician. He is best known as a signatory to the U.S. Constitution, and for representing North Carolina ...
for the
Printing Historical Society The Printing Historical Society or 'PHS' is a learned society devoted to the study of the history of printing, in all its forms.
History
The Society was founded in London in 1964 by a group of teachers, scholars, students of design and bibliography ...
as "well-suited to photocomposition and to offset printing". It also received two detailed reviews in the same issue of ''Printing History'', both a favourable one by Jery Kelly and a more critical one by book designer Mark Argetsinger. Argetsinger felt that while the ''parangonne'' type was "a very beautiful design", the choice to base a text type on it produced a type of "relative pallidness" when printed by lithography. He recommended that Adobe add more optical sizes.
Garamond Premier
During the production of
Adobe Garamond
Garamond is a group of many serif typefaces, named for sixteenth-century Parisian engraver Claude Garamond, generally spelled as Garamont in his lifetime. Garamond-style typefaces are popular and particularly often used for book printing and b ...
, its designer
Robert Slimbach
Robert Joseph Slimbach is Principal Type Designer at Adobe, Inc., where he has worked since 1987. He has won many awards for his digital typeface designs, including the rarely awarded Prix Charles Peignot from the Association Typographique Inter ...
started planning for a second interpretation of Garamond after visiting the Plantin-Moretus Museum in 1988. He concluded that a digital revival of Garamond's work would not be definitive unless it offered optical sizes, with different fonts designed for different sizes of text. Unable to create such a large range of styles practically with the technology and business requirements of the 1980s, he completed the project in 2005. Adobe states that Garamond Premier was developed based on multiple specimens at the Plantin-Moretus Museum.
Garamond Premier has 4 optical sizes (Regular, Caption, Subhead, and Display) and at least 4 weights (Regular, Medium, Semibold, and Bold, with an additional Light weight for Display), each with its respective italic, totalling 34 styles in the OpenType font format. Garamond Premier and its predecessor Adobe Garamond have the same x-heights, but they have many subtle differences in their designs. At the same weights and x-heights (hence font sizes), Garamond Premier is slightly darker and has tighter spacing than Adobe Garamond. Some other notable differences include (but are not limited to) the designs of the lowercase "t", lowercase "r", and uppercase "Q".
It features glyph coverage for Central European,
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
characters including polytonics. Professor Gerry Leonidas, an expert in Greek-language printing, described it in 2005 as "bar none, the most accomplished typeface you can get for complex Greek texts". Adobe executive Thomas Phinney characterized Garamond Premier as a "more directly authentic revival" than their earlier Garamond, which he described as "a more restrained and modernized interpretation".
EB Garamond
The ''EB Garamond'' (»Egenolff-Berner-Garamond«), released by Georg Duffner in 2011 under the Open Font License, is a
free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
implementation of Garamond. Duffner based the design on the 1592 Berner specimen, with italic and Greek characters based on Robert Granjon's work, as well as the addition of Cyrillic characters and OpenType features such as swash italic capitals and schoolbookalternates. , it was intended to include multiple optical sizes, including fonts based on the 8 and 12 point sizes. It has been described as "one of the best open source fonts" by prominent typeface designer
Erik Spiekermann
Erik Spiekermann (born 30 May 1947 in Stadthagen, Lower Saxony) is a German typographer, designer and writer. He is an honorary professor at the University of the Arts Bremen and ArtCenter College of Design.
Biography
Spiekermann studied art his ...
. As Georg Duffner was unable to complete the bold weights for personal reasons, the project was continued by Octavio Pardo.
Based on Jannon's design
ATF Garamond/Garamond No. 3
American Type Founders created a revival of the Imprimerie Nationale fonts from around 1917, which was designed in-house by its design department led by
Morris Fuller Benton
Morris Fuller Benton (November 30, 1872 – June 30, 1948) was an American typeface designer who headed the design department of the American Type Founders (ATF), for which he was the chief type designer from 1900 to 1937.
Many of Benton's ...
under the influence of its historian and advisor Henry Lewis Bullen. It received a sumptuous showing, marketed especially towards advertisers, in ATF's 1923 specimen book. Also involved in the design's development was book and advertising designer T.M. Cleland, who created a set of matching borders and ornaments and according to Warde and Garnett also advised on the design and designed the swash characters.
While ATF's handset foundry type release was initially popular, the design became particularly known to later users under the name of "Garamond No. 3”, as a hot metal adaptation that was licensed to Linotype's American branch and sold from around 1936. More practical to use than ATF's handset foundry type, the number distinguished it from two versions of Stempel Garamond which Linotype also sold. It was the preferred Garalde font of prominent designer
Massimo Vignelli
Massimo Vignelli (; January 10, 1931 – May 27, 2014) was an Italian designer who worked in a number of areas including packaging, houseware, furniture, public signage, and showroom design. He was the co-founder of Vignelli Associates, with his ...
.
Several digitisations have been made of both ATF's Garamond and the Linotype adaptation, most notably a 2015 digitisation by van Bronkhorst with optical sizes and the original swash characters. A loose adaptation with sans-serif companion by
Christian Schwartz
Christian Schwartz (born December 30, 1977 in Concord, New Hampshire, United States) is an American type designer. He has been awarded the German Design Award and the Prix Charles Peignot.
Life
A graduate of the Communication Design program at ...
is the corporate font of
Deutsche Bahn
The (; abbreviated as DB or DB AG) is the national railway company of Germany. Headquartered in the Bahntower in Berlin, it is a joint-stock company ( AG). The Federal Republic of Germany is its single shareholder.
describes itself as the se ...
Monotype's 1922–1923 design, based on Jannon's work in the Imprimerie Nationale, is bundled with
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketin ...
. Its italic, faithful to Jannon's, is extremely calligraphic, with a variable angle of slant and flourishes on several lower-case letters. Its commercial release is more extensive than the basic Microsoft release, including additional features such as swash capitals and small capitals, although like many pre-digital fonts these are only included in the regular weight. Popular in the metal type era, its digitisation has been criticised for having too light a
colour
Color (American English) or colour (British English) is the visual perceptual property deriving from the spectrum of light interacting with the photoreceptor cells of the eyes. Color categories and physical specifications of color are associ ...
on the page for body text if printed with many common printing systems, a problem with several Monotype digitisations of the period. Monotype's 1933 guide to identifying their typefaces noted the asymmetrical T, the sharp triangular serif at top left of m, n, p and r, and a q unlike the p, with a point at top right rather than a full serif.
Monotype's artistic advisor
Stanley Morison
Stanley Arthur Morison (6 May 1889 – 11 October 1967) was a British typographer, printing executive and historian of printing. Largely self-educated, he promoted higher standards in printing and an awareness of the best printing and typefaces o ...
wrote in his memoir that the italic was based on Granjon's work, but as Carter's commentary on it notes, this seems generally to be a mistake. The swash capitals, however, at least, probably are based on the work of Granjon. A 1959 publicity design promoting it was created by a young
Rodney Peppé
Rodney Darrell Peppé (24 June 1934 – 27 October 2022) was a British author and illustrator in the children's fiction and crafts genres. He was the author and illustrator of more than 80 children's books, publishing his first children's book ...
.
Garamont
A revival by
Frederic Goudy
Frederic William Goudy (, March 8, 1865 – May 11, 1947) was an American printer, artist and type designer whose typefaces include Copperplate Gothic, Goudy Old Style and Kennerley. He was one of the most prolific of American type designers and ...
for the American branch of Monotype, the name chosen to differ from other revivals. An elegant sample created by Bruce Rogers was shown in a spring 1923 issue of Monotype's magazine. It, like Monotype Garamond, features a large range of swash characters, based on Imprimerie Nationale specimen sheets.
Mosley has described it as "a lively type, underappreciated I think."LTC's digitisation deliberately maintained its eccentricity and irregularity true to period printing, avoiding perfect verticals. In 1923, Morison at the British branch of Monotype thought it somewhat florid in comparison to the version of his branch which he considered a personal project, noting in a 1923 letter to American printer
Daniel Berkeley Updike
Daniel Berkeley Updike (February 14, 1860 – December 29, 1941) was an American printer and historian of typography. In 1880 he joined the publishers Houghton, Mifflin & Company, of Boston as an errand boy. He worked for the firm's Riverside ...
that "I entertain very decided opinions about this latest of Mr. Goudy's achievements ... a comparison leaves me with a preference for our version."
Simoncini Garamond
A 1950s version following Jannon by the Simoncini company of Italy, owned by Francesco Simoncini, which sold matrices for Linotype machines. It is particularly popular in Italian printing.
Jannon
František Štorm
František "Franta" Štorm (born 3 July 1966) is a Czech musician, photographer, typographer, writer, teacher, artist, illustrator and record producer, famous for being the vocalist and a founding member of the black metal band Master's Hammer.
...
's 2010 revival with optical sizes is one of the few modern revivals of Jannon's work. Štorm also created a matching sans-serif companion design, Jannon Sans.
Related fonts
As one of the most popular typefaces in history, a number of designs have been created that are influenced by Garamond's design but follow different design paths.
ITC Garamond
ITC Garamond was created by Tony Stan in 1975, and follows ITC's house style of unusually high x-height. It was initially intended to serve as a display version but has been used for text, in which its tight spacing and high x-height gives it a somewhat hectoring appearance. As a result, it has proven somewhat controversial among designers; it is generally considered poorly proportioned for body text. It remains the corporate font of the
California State University
The California State University (Cal State or CSU) is a public university system in California. With 23 campuses and eight off-campus centers enrolling 485,550 students with 55,909 faculty and staff, CSU is the largest four-year public univers ...
system in printed text. As seen below, it was also modified into Apple Garamond which served as Apple's corporate font from 1984 until replacement starting in 2002 with
Myriad
A myriad (from Ancient Greek grc, μυριάς, translit=myrias, label=none) is technically the number 10,000 (ten thousand); in that sense, the term is used in English almost exclusively for literal translations from Greek, Latin or Sinospher ...
. Publishers using it included
O'Reilly Media
O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) is an American learning company established by Tim O'Reilly that publishes books, produces tech conferences, and provides an online learning platform. Its distinctive brand features a woodcut of an ...
and French publisher Actes Sud.
Cormorant
An open-source adaptation of Garamond intended for display sizes, designed by Christian Thalmann and co-released with Google Fonts. It features a delicate style suitable for printing at larger sizes, and considerable contrast in stroke weight in its larger sizes. Thalmann added several unusual alternate designs such as an upright italic and unicase styles, as well as exaggerated, highly slanting accents.
Sans-serif designs
Several
sans-serif
In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than seri ...
typefaces have been published that are based on the proportions of Garamond-style fonts, both as standalone designs or as part of a
font superfamily
{{unsourced, date=March 2019
In typography, a font superfamily or typeface superfamily is a font family containing
fonts that fall into multiple classifications.
The norm in a superfamily is to start from an identical character shape; class-spec ...
with matching serif and sans-serif fonts. One example is Claude Sans, a humanist sans-serif based on the letterforms of Jannon's type, created by Alan Meeks and published by
Letraset
Letraset was a company known mainly for manufacturing sheets of typefaces and other artwork elements using the dry transfer method. Letraset has been acquired by the Colart group and become part of its subsidiary Winsor & Newton.
Corporate histor ...
and later ITC.
In popular culture
* In
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator. In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel ''The Name of the ...
's novel ''
Foucault's Pendulum
''Foucault's Pendulum'' (original title: ''Il pendolo di Foucault'' ) is a novel by Italian writer and philosopher Umberto Eco. It was first published in 1988, and an English translation by William Weaver appeared a year later.
''Foucault's P ...
'', the protagonists work for a pair of related publishing companies, Garamond and
Manuzio
Aldus Pius Manutius (; it, Aldo Pio Manuzio; 6 February 1515) was an Italian printer and humanist who founded the Aldine Press. Manutius devoted the later part of his life to publishing and disseminating rare texts. His interest in and preserv ...
, both owned by a Mister Garamond.
* Garamond is the name of a character in the
Wii
The Wii ( ) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Nintendo. It was released on November 19, 2006, in North America and in December 2006 for most other Regional lockout, regions of the world. It is Nintendo's fifth major ho ...
game ''
Super Paper Mario
is a 2007 action role-playing game (RPG) developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo for the Wii. It is the third installment in the ''Paper Mario'' series and the first Mario (franchise), Mario game to be released on the Wii. T ...
''. He appears in the world of Flopside (the mirror-image of Flipside, where the game begins). He is a prolific and highly successful author, unlike his Flipside counterpart,
Helvetica
Helvetica (originally Neue Haas Grotesk) is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann.
Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the famous 19th century (1890s) ...
.
* For many years the masthead of British newspaper ''
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'' used "The" in italic 'Garamond' and "Guardian" in bold
Helvetica
Helvetica (originally Neue Haas Grotesk) is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann.
Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the famous 19th century (1890s) ...
Apple
An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...
in 1984 upon the release of the
Macintosh
The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...
, known as Apple Garamond. This was a proprietary font not publicly available, less condensed than the publicly released ITC Garamond Condensed.
* One of the initial goals of the literary journal ''
Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern
''Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern'' is an American literary journal, founded in 1998, typically containing short stories, reportage, and illustrations. Some issues also include poetry, comic strips, and novellas. ''The Quarterly Concern'' is ...
'' was to use only a single font: Garamond 3. The editor of the journal,
Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers (born March 12, 1970) is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He wrote the 2000 best-selling memoir ''A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius''. Eggers is also the founder of ''Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern'', a lite ...
, has stated that it is his favourite font, "because it looked good in so many permutations—italics, small caps, all caps, tracked out, justified or not."
* In Robin Sloan's fantasy novel ''
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
''Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore'' is a 2012 novel by American writer Robin Sloan. It was chosen as one of the best 100 books of 2012 by the ''San Francisco Chronicle'', was a ''New York Times'' Editor's Choice, and was on the New York Times Har ...
Faerie
Fairyland (''Faerie'', Scottish ''Elfame'', c.f. Old Norse ''Álfheimr'') in English and Scottish folklore is the fabulous land or abode of fairies or ''fays''. Old French (Early Modern English ) referred to an illusion or enchantment, the land ...
is called Garamond. It is ruled by the Squire of Garamond, whose "only heir was transformed into a Gruntling Pig-wiggin." The realm occurs in the idiom "something is so loud it can be heard from Garamond to Stormhold" and includes an unnamed island in a lake that is the only known origin of a magical herb called Limbus Grass, which compels those who eat it to answer any question truthfully.
Printer ink claim
It has been claimed that Garamond uses much less ink than
Times New Roman
Times New Roman is a serif typeface. It was commissioned by the British newspaper ''The Times'' in 1931 and conceived by Stanley Morison, the artistic adviser to the British branch of the printing equipment company Monotype, in collaboration wit ...
at a similar point size, so changing to Garamond could be a cost-saver for large organizations that print large numbers of documents, especially if using
inkjet printer
Inkjet printing is a type of computer printing that recreates a digital image by propelling droplets of ink onto paper and plastic substrates. Inkjet printers were the most commonly used type of printer in 2008, and range from small inexpensi ...
s. Garamond, along with Times New Roman and
Century Gothic
A century is a period of 100 years. Centuries are numbered names of numbers in English#Ordinal numbers, ordinally in English and many other languages. The word ''century'' comes from the Latin ''centum'', meaning ''one hundred''. ''Century'' is s ...
, has been identified by the GSA as a "toner-efficient" font.
This claim has been criticised as a misinterpretation of how typefaces are actually measured and what printing methods are desirable.
Monotype Garamond
Garamond is a group of many serif typefaces, named for sixteenth-century Parisian engraver Claude Garamond, generally spelled as Garamont in his lifetime. Garamond-style typefaces are popular and particularly often used for book printing and bo ...
, the version bundled with
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketin ...
, has a generally smaller design at the same nominal point size compared to Times New Roman and quite spindly strokes, giving it a more elegant but less readable appearance. In order to increase the legibility of Garamond, a common approach in typography is to increase text size such that the height of its lower-case characters (i.e., the absolute
x-height
upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography
In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the let ...
of the font) matches that of Times New Roman, which counterbalances cost savings. Thomas Phinney, an expert on digital fonts, noted that the effect of simply swapping Garamond in would be compromised legibility: "any of those changes, swapping to a font that sets smaller at the same nominal point size, or actually reducing the point size, or picking a thinner typeface, will reduce the legibility of the text. That seems like a bad idea, as the percentage of Americans with poor eyesight is skyrocketing." Professional type designer Jackson Cavanaugh commented "If we're actually interested in reducing waste, just printing less – using less paper – is obviously more efficient."
Gallery
Plantin-Moretus museum.jpg, The Plantin-Moretus Museum, which preserves original Garamond punches and matrices.
Plantin-Moretus punches 1.jpg, Punches for metal type founding at the Plantin-Moretus Museum, Antwerp.
Plantin-Moretus punches 2.jpg, Punches at the Plantin-Moretus Museum.
Bembo M.jpg, The asymmetrical 'Bembo M' in a French textbook
Three ages.png, Monotype Garamond (based on Jannon) compared to the more geometric transitional serif and Didone type that replaced old-styles during the eighteenth century.
Inc S-485 (cropped).jpg, A title page printed in Paris in 1508 showing the style preceding the 1530s: a font dark in colour, with wide capitals, tilted 'e's, large dots on the 'i' recalling calligraphy and blackletter headings.
Serlio Livre extraordinaire 1551.jpg, A very large-size font (c. 120 pt) in a 1551 book by
Jean de Tournes
Jean de Tournes (1504 – 1564) was a French printer, book publisher and bookseller, and the founder of a long-lasting family printing business. From 1559 he was the , printer to the French king.
Life
Jean de Tournes was born in Lyon in ...
, showing Garalde letterforms magnified to display size with sharpened contrast. Designer unidentified.
Bruce Rogers Garamont specimen page 20 detail.jpg, Frederic Goudy's Garamont type for the American Monotype company in close-up.
Monotype Garamont Type Specimen.jpg, The American Monotype's Garamont specimen, showing the capitals.
Bruce Rogers Garamont specimen page 24.jpg, The colophon of Monotype's Garamont sample, showing the italic and ligatures.
Optical Size Demonstration.png, Optical sizes in EB Garamond. Top, correct use: large text more delicate, small text more solid. Below, wrong way round.
Jannon and Jannon Sans.gif, A specimen of František Štorm's revival of Jannon's type with bold and sans-serif derivatives.
2007-05 PMM 03.jpg, Type set up in a
forme
Forme may refer to the following:
*Forme (printing), a chase with type locked up ready for printing
*Forme, Škofja Loka, a settlement in Slovenia
*Forme Tour, a professional golf tour
See also
* FORM (disambiguation)
* Form (disambiguation)
For ...
at the Plantin-Moretus Museum. Text is a
sonnet
A sonnet is a poetic form that originated in the poetry composed at the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The 13th-century poet and notary Giacomo da Lentini is credited with the sonnet's invention, ...
by Plantin.
Peter Paul Rubens - Christoffel Plantin - WGA20356.jpg, Plantin painted posthumously by Rubens.
Luc Devroye
Luc P. Devroye is a Belgian computer scientist and mathematician and a James McGill Professor in the School of Computer Science of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Devroye specializes in the probabilistic analysis of algorithms, r ...