Granjon is an
old-style 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 designed by
George W. Jones
George Wallace Jones (April 12, 1804 – July 22, 1896) was an American frontiersman, entrepreneur, attorney, and judge, was among the first two United States Senators to represent the state of Iowa after it was admitted to the Union in 1846 ...
around 1924 for the British branch of the Linotype company, and based on the
Garamond typeface that was used in a book printed by the Parisian Jean Poupy in 1592. The roman design was from
Claude Garamond and the italic version was from
Robert Granjon. Because several other Garamonds were on the market in the 1920s, Jones decided to name his type Granjon. Jones, a master printer based in London, had been engaged by Linotype to improve the quality of their typeface range through the development of revivals of notable type designs of the past.
Granjon was popular in the metal type era and
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 ...
described it as her favourite revival of French renaissance typefaces in her famous 1926 article on the topic; it was also praised by former Linotype designer
Walter Tracy.
(Many of the Garamond revivals of the 1920s were later shown to be actually based on the types of Jean Jannon; Granjon was an exception to this. Warde commented "It would seem that Garamond's name, having so long been used on a design he never cut, is now by stern justice left off a face which is undoubtedly his."
) Jones developed a companion bold named Bernhard, named for sixteenth-century engraver
Bernard Salomon. A longtime popular text type, Granjon's digital version is sometimes criticized as being "anemic" in smaller point sizes.
References
*Friedl, Frederich, Nicholas Ott and Bernard Stein. ''Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Through History.'' Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. .
*Jaspert, Berry and Johnson. ''Encyclopaedia of Type Faces.'' Cassell Paperback, London; 2001.
*Lawson, Alexander S., ''
Anatomy of a Typeface''. Godine: 1990. .
*Macmillan, Neil. ''An A–Z of Type Designers.'' Yale University Press: 2006. .
External links
{{Commons category, Granjon (typeface), Granjon
Granjon Font Family - by George W. JonesMyFonts web page for Granjon
Linotype typefaces
Old style serif typefaces