Plantin 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
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 ...
. It was created in 1913 by the British
Monotype Corporation
Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc., founded as Lanston Monotype Machine Company in 1887 in Philadelphia by Tolbert Lanston, is an American (historically Anglo-American) company that specializes in digital typesetting and typeface design for use with ...
for their
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 ...
system and is named after the sixteenth-century printer
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 ...
.
It is loosely based on a Gros Cicero
roman type
In Latin script typography, roman is one of the three main kinds of historical type, alongside blackletter and italic. Roman type was modelled from a European scribal manuscript style of the 15th century, based on the pairing of inscriptional ...
cut in the 16th century by
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 ...
held in the collection of 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 ...
,
Antwerp
Antwerp (; nl, Antwerpen ; french: Anvers ; es, Amberes) is the largest city in Belgium by area at and the capital of Antwerp Province in the Flemish Region. With a population of 520,504, .
The intention behind the design of Plantin was to create a font with thicker letterforms than were often used at the time: early printing on absorbent
book paper
A book paper (or publishing paper) is a paper that is designed specifically for the publication of printed books.
Traditionally, book papers are off-white or low-white papers (easier to read), are opaque to minimise the show-through of text fro ...
led to ink spread, but by 1913 innovations in smoothing and
coated paper
Coated paper (also known as enamel paper, gloss paper, and thin paper) is paper that has been coated by a mixture of materials or a polymer to impart certain qualities to the paper, including weight, surface gloss, smoothness, or reduced ink absor ...
paper had led to reduced ink spread and made old types often look skeletal on paper.
[.] Monotype engineering manager
Frank Hinman Pierpont
Frank Hinman Pierpont (born 1860, New Haven, Connecticut – died 11 February 1937, England) was an American engineer and typeface designer. He worked primarily in England for the Monotype Corporation of Britain.
After training as a mechanic ...
visited the Plantin-Moretus Museum, where he acquired a printed specimen of historic types.
Plantin was one of the first Monotype Corporation revivals that was not simply a copy of a typeface already popular in British printing; it has proved popular since its release and has been digitised. Monotype followed it with revivals of many other classic typefaces in the 1920s and 30s.
Plantin would later also be used as one of the main models for the creation of
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 ...
in the 1930s. The Plantin family includes regular, light and bold weights, along with corresponding italics.
Inspiration
![Plantin-Moretus punches 1](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Plantin-Moretus_punches_1.jpg)
At the time Plantin was released, Monotype's
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 ...
system, which cast new type for each printing job, was developing a reputation for practicality in trade and mass-market printing, but the designs offered by Monotype were relatively basic choices, such as a
"modern" face, an
"old style" and a
Clarendon.
James Moran and
John Dreyfus
John G. Dreyfus (15 April 1918 – 29 December 2002) was a British book designer and historian of printing who worked for Cambridge University Press and the Monotype printing company. He was also president of the ATypI trade association. ''Into P ...
suggested that an inspiration for the design may have been a c. 1910 family from the
Shanks foundry known as "Plantin Old Style", advertised as highly legible.
This was actually a bold design based on
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 ...
, with no connection to Christophe Plantin or Granjon, but Dreyfus suggests it may have prompted Monotype to research Christophe Plantin and the collection of the Plantin-Moretus Museum.
The Plantin-Moretus Museum was created in 1876 from Plantin's collection which had been preserved and added to by his successors in business. It is notable as the world's largest collection of sixteenth century typefaces.
Although Plantin commissioned types from Granjon, according to
Hendrik Vervliet
Hendrik Désiré Louis 'Dis' Vervliet ( Antwerp, 31 December 1923 – August 2020) was a Belgian librarian and historian of books and printing.
Life
Vervliet was born into a working-class family and received a doctorate in classical philolog ...
the specific type Pierpont's design was based on began to be used by the Plantin-Moretus Press only in the 18th century, after Plantin had died and his press had been inherited by the
Moretus family.
(It has been reported that Plantin did use the long letters of the type as replacement letters to cast a type by
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 ...
shorter height, but Vervliet suggests that these may have been a set of slightly different characters cut by Granjon separately.
)
Plantin was designed and engraved into metal at the Monotype factory in
Salfords
Salfords ) is a village in the borough of Reigate and Banstead in Surrey, England. It lies approximately south of Redhill on the A23 London to Brighton road. The village is within the civil parish of Salfords and Sidlow which covers a popu ...
,
Surrey
Surrey () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in South East England, bordering Greater London to the south west. Surrey has a large rural area, and several significant urban areas which form part of the Greater London Built-up Area. ...
, which was led by Pierpont and draughtsman Fritz Stelzer. Both were recruits to Monotype from the German printing industry.
The choice to revive a French Renaissance design was unusual for the time, since most British fine printers of the period preferred either
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 ...
or revivals of the fifteenth-century style of
Nicolas Jenson
Nicholas Jenson (c. 1420 – 1480) was a French engraver, pioneer, printer and type designer who carried out most of his work in Venice, Italy. Jenson acted as Master of the French Royal Mint at Tours and is credited with being the creator of on ...
(recognisable from the tilted 'e'), following the lead of
William Morris
William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) was a British textile designer, poet, artist, novelist, architectural conservationist, printer, translator and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts Movement. He ...
's
Golden Type
The Golden Type is a serif font designed by artist William Morris for his fine book printing project, the Kelmscott Press, in 1890. It is an "old-style" serif font, based on type designed by engraver and printer Nicolas Jenson in Venice around 147 ...
, both of which Monotype would also develop revivals of.
However, other revivals of Aldine/French renaissance typefaces followed from several hot metal typesetting companies in the following decades, including Monotype's own
Poliphilus,
Bembo
Bembo is a serif typeface created by the British branch of the Monotype Corporation in 1928–1929 and most commonly used for body text. It is a member of the " old-style" of serif fonts, with its regular or roman style based on a design cut a ...
and
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 ...
, Linotype's
Granjon
Granjon is an old-style serif typeface designed by George W. Jones 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 desi ...
and
Estienne Estienne is a French surname or given name. Notable people with the name include:
Given name
* Estienne or Étienne de La Boétie (1530–1563), French philosopher, judge and writer
* Estienne Grossin (), French composer
* Estienne de La Roche (147 ...
and others, becoming very popular in book printing for body text.
Design
![Old Style](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Old_Style.jpg)
The design for Plantin preserved the large
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 Granjon's designs, but shortened the
ascenders and descenders and enlarged the
counters of the lowercase 'a' and 'e'.
Not all the letters were Granjon's: the letters 'J', 'U' and 'W', not used in French in the sixteenth century, were not his, and a different 'a' in an eighteenth-century style had been substituted into the font by the time the specimen sheet was printed.
The 1742 specimen of Claude Lamesle (notable for its printing quality) provides a specimen of the Granjon type in its original state.
Mosley has close-up images of some characters of the face.
Reception and usage
![Plantin Fontshop](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Plantin_Fontshop.gif)
With its relatively robust, solid design compared to the
Didone and "
Modernised Old Style
Old Style or Modernised Old Style was the name given to a series of serif typefaces cut from the mid-nineteenth century and sold by the type foundry Miller & Richard, of Edinburgh in Scotland. It was a standard typeface in Britain for literary an ...
" faces popular in the early twentieth century (which Monotype already had made versions of), Plantin proved popular and was often particularly used by trade and newspaper printers using poor-quality paper in the metal type period and beyond. Monotype's advertising emphasised its popularity with advertisers, highlighting its use in the "Mrs Rawlins" series of adverts for washing starch.
As the basic font is relatively dark on the page, Monotype offered a 'light' version as well as a bold, which
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 ...
describes as "particularly suitable for bookwork."
During the
interwar period
In the history of the 20th century, the interwar period lasted from 11 November 1918 to 1 September 1939 (20 years, 9 months, 21 days), the end of the World War I, First World War to the beginning of the World War II, Second World War. The in ...
the face was adopted and popularized by
Francis Meynell
Sir Francis Meredith Wilfrid Meynell (12 May 1891 – 10 July 1975) was a British poet and printer at The Nonesuch Press.
Early career
He was the son of the journalist and publisher Wilfrid Meynell and the poet Alice Meynell, a suffragist and ...
's Pelican Press and by C. W. Hobson's Cloister press, and also used occasionally by
Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII of England, King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press
A university press is an academic publishing hou ...
.
A custom version, "Nonesuch Plantin" was also cut for Meynell's
Nonesuch Press
Nonesuch Press was a private press founded in 1922 in London by Francis Meynell, his second wife Vera Mendel, and their mutual friend David Garnett,Miranda Knorr"The Nonesuch Press: A Product of Determination" An Exhibit of Rare Books at the Oka ...
, one of the first
fine printers to use Monotype machines, with extended ascenders and descenders on the lower-case.
Type designer
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 ...
noted that this changed the type's appearance to a surprising extent: "it look
not only more refined but as if it derived from another period:
Fournier's, say
n the eighteenth century not Granjon's."
It was appropriately used by the Bodley Head to print Meynell's autobiography.
Monotype also created a condensed version, News Plantin, for ''The Observer'' in the late 1970s.
An
infant variety of the typeface called Plantin Infant also exists,
with
single-story versions of the letters 'a' and 'g' and a 'y' with two straight sides.
The font was used as the signature font for
ABC News
ABC News is the news division of the American broadcast network ABC. Its flagship program is the daily evening newscast ''ABC World News Tonight, ABC World News Tonight with David Muir''; other programs include Breakfast television, morning ...
from 1978 until 1999. In more recent usage, the magazine
''Monocle'' is set entirely in Plantin and
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) ...
.
The body text of all ''
Magic: The Gathering
''Magic: The Gathering'' (colloquially known as ''Magic'' or ''MTG'') is a Tabletop game, tabletop and Digital collectible card game, digital Collectible card game, collectable card game created by Richard Garfield. Released in 1993 by Wizards ...
'' cards is also set in Plantin.
Designs inspired by Plantin
![Times ancestors](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Times_ancestors.png)
Plantin was the basis for the general layout of Monotype's most successful typeface of all, Times New Roman.
Times is similar to Plantin but "sharpened" or "modernised", with increased contrast (particularly resembling designs from the eighteenth and nineteenth century) and greater "sparkle".
Allan Haley commented that Times New Roman "looks like Plantin on a diet."
As the Plantin design is in the public domain, adaptations and unofficial digitisations (including simple knock-offs) have been released. Galaxie Copernicus by Chester Jenkins and
Kris Sowersby
The kris, or ''keris'' in the Indonesian language, is an asymmetrical dagger with distinctive blade-patterning achieved through alternating laminations of iron and nickelous iron (''pamor''). Of Javanese origin, the kris is famous for its dist ...
is a reinterpretation of Plantin.
Sowersby followed it with a newspaper typeface, Tiempos, influenced by Times New Roman.
Fabric Serif is another reinterpretation.
Other similar designs include Musee by DSType
and Erato by Hoftype.
Aldine 721 is Bitstream's version of Plantin
and Francisco Serial is a version by Softmaker.
References
External links
Plantin{{Monotype typefaces
Old style serif typefaces
Linotype typefaces
Typefaces with infant variants
Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1913
Monotype typefaces