The Fonderie Olive, in English, Olive Foundry, was a small but high-profile
type foundry
A type foundry is a company that designs or distributes typefaces. Before digital typography, type foundries manufactured and sold metal and wood typefaces for hand typesetting, and matrices for line-casting machines like the Linotype and M ...
located in
Marseille
Marseille ( , , ; also spelled in English as Marseilles; oc, Marselha ) is the prefecture of the French department of Bouches-du-Rhône and capital of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region. Situated in the camargue region of southern Fra ...
,
France
France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan area ...
. It is best known for the work of the
typeface designer
Type design is the art and process of designing typefaces. This involves drawing each letterform using a consistent style. The basic concepts and design variables are described below.
A typeface differs from other modes of graphic production su ...
Roger Excoffon
Roger Excoffon (7 September 1910 – 30 May 1983) was a French typeface designer and graphic designer.
Excoffon was born in Marseille, studied law at the University of Aix-en-Provence, and then moved to Paris to apprentice in a print shop. ...
. In 1978 the foundry was acquired by the
Mergenthaler Linotype Company
The Mergenthaler Linotype Company is a corporation founded in the United States in 1886 to market the Linotype machine (), a system to cast metal type in lines (linecaster) invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler. It became the world's leading manufacture ...
which transferred photocomposition rights for all faces to
Haas.
Typefaces
These foundry types were produced by Fonderie Olive:
[Jaspert, W. Pincus, W. Turner Berry and A.F. Johnson. ''The Encyclopedia of Type Faces.'' Blandford Press Lts.: 1953, 1983, , p. 2408-249]
References
Letterpress font foundries of France
Metal companies of France
Manufacturing companies based in Marseille
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