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Flick through various foundry cat­a­logs for a Gara­mond revival or adap­tion and you’re bound to dis­cover more than garalde type­faces. Inter­spersed amongst the many Gara­monds you’ll find erro­neously titled baroque faces works by another type designer, Jean Jannon. I decided to inves­ti­gate the affair and while doing so swept the dust off a little history of French print­ing.

Prelude: the birth of French printing

The Euro­pean inven­tion of let­ter­press print­ing with movable type by Johannes Guten­berg c. 1450 sys­tem­atized the Latin alpha­bet into indi­vid­ual char­ac­ters that could be phys­i­cally com­posed and reused. Because Latin letters amal­ga­mate into an alphabet—distinct from logogra­phies and syl­labaries—they are par­tic­u­larly well suited to be divided, cut, and finally cast into pieces of metal type that reside in wooden cases (fig. 1.). Majus­cules (capital letters) lived in the “upper case” whilst the minus­cules (small letters) inhab­ited the “lower case”. This is where we draw the syn­onyms for upper- and low­er­case from.This was the basis for the rev­o­lu­tion­ary adop­tion in place of the metic­u­lous copying of books by hand word-​for-​word and saw the estab­lish­ment of an inte­gral part of the print­ing trade: typog­ra­phy.

A reprint of a page of one of the Guten­berg Bibles, from Mainz, Germany. Gutenberg’s type­faces epit­o­mize the strong gothic ele­ments that we now clas­sify as black­let­ter. The face in par­tic­u­lar is a textura black­let­ter.

A sort is a single piece of metal type, a letter of one spe­cific type­face and size. In digital typog­ra­phy it has been replaced by the term glyph as digital type does not phys­i­cally exist until printed. Thus a sort of Bembo italic at 12 points is dis­tinct from another of Bembo italic 10 points. Con­versely those that seman­ti­cally share the same letter but are styl­is­ti­cally different—even if of the same family and point size—are also clas­si­fied as dif­fer­ent sorts.Fig. 1. Metal sorts being set on a com­po­si­tion stick with many more organ­ised in a job case under­neath. Photo by Willi Hei­del­bach.

The trade of print­ing quickly spread through­out Europe. It was intro­duced to France in 1470 by Johann Heynlin and Guil­laume Fichet—two pro­fes­sors of the Sor­bonne, the his­toric uni­ver­sity of Paris—who enlisted the aid of German print­ers to estab­lish the first print­ing house. Three print­ers from Mainz helped them con­struct the presses, equip­ment and began cutting type. Still in the same year they printed France’s very first book, Gas­parini Epis­to­lae (“Letters”), written by the Italian gram­mar­ian Gas­parino da Bariz­izza.

Traditional preferences

Gas­parini Epis­to­lae was set in a human­ist black­let­ter (fig. 2). The face was a hybrid from a merging of roman and gothic ele­ments. The style was rebuffed in favour of the tra­di­tional gothic prop­er­ties of black­let­ter which French readers had grown accus­tomed to; unlike the human­ist faces that were cut during the Italian Renais­sance, human­ist type­faces weren’t met as can­didly in France as else­where in Europe. French typog­ra­phy remained mod­er­ately con­ser­v­a­tive, uti­liz­ing heavy black­let­ter faces of one style or another to set most printed mate­r­ial until the turn of the century.

Fig. 2. A sample of the human­ist black­let­ter hybrid from Gas­parini Epis­to­lae, Har­alam­bous, Y., 2007, Fonts & Encod­ings (p. 375), English edition, O’Reilly Media Inc., Cal­i­for­nia, USA.

There are two note­wor­thy inter­ludes between the end of the 15^th century and the cutting of garalde faces in the early 16^th century. In 1477 came the first book printed in French, an unusual and con­tro­ver­sial venture as French was con­sid­ered too vulgar to be set in print. Typ­i­cally Latin was used for the written word, even in Germany at the time. It was set in cute bas­tarda (or Schwabacher) by Pasquier Bon­homme. Then in 1529 Geofrey de Troy, the per­sonal printer to King François I, took the next steps that led to the broader adop­tion of roman with the print­ing of his book, Le Champ Fleury in which he put forth his theory that letter forms and human anatomy are closely linked.

The Garalades and Garamond

By the mid 16^thcentury print­ing was a solid indus­try. Cer­tainly print­ing was still expen­sive, however it had become more eco­nom­i­cally viable and less time-​consuming than the the pre­vi­ous option of employ­ing scribes. Fol­low­ing the clas­si­cal human­ist type­faces, typo­graph­i­cally in the 16^th century came the garalde (or old-​style) faces, paying homage to Claude Garamond and Aldus Manu­tius. These fea­tured a heavier weight and stronger empha­sis on the down­wards strokes than their antecedents (fig. 3). The weight can be attrib­uted to a more oblique axis of the pen; garalde faces in no way loose their human­ist ele­ments. Today the best known gar­aldes faces are Gara­mond and Bembo, the former of which there are many ver­sions of. Other notable digital ren­di­tions include Adobe Gara­mond, Granjon, Sabon, and Stempel Gara­mond.

Fig. 3. Top: 72 point Centaur, cut by Bruce Rogers in 1912–1914 and based on cuts by Nicholas Jenson made in the height of the Venet­ian Renais­sance, 1469; bottom: 72 point Stempel Gara­mond, a true Gara­mon­dian revival by the Stempel Foundry, 1924. It was later dig­i­tized by Lino­type.

The other Garamond

A century after Claude Gara­mond came Jean Jannon (1580–1658). Jannon was a French Protes­tant printer who began cutting type in the Protes­tant Academy in Sedan, France. He cut his type during the French Renais­sance but did so ille­gally under the Catholic regime and con­se­quently had his casts seized in 1641 by agents of the French crown, under orders of Car­di­nal Riche­lieu (who iron­i­cally used Jannon’s work to later to set his own memoirs, Prin­ci­paux Points de la Foi). Jannon’s work sat locked-​away for two cen­turies before seeing the light of day again. When they were uncov­ered they were misiden­ti­fied as cuts by Claude Gara­mond, and hence named there­after Gara­mond. Many digital revivals still carry on this error: ATF ‘Garamond’, Lanston ‘Garamond’, numer­ous ver­sions of Mono­type ‘Garamond’ and Simoncini ‘Garamond’. Jannon’s work is baroque in nature; it is easily dis­tin­guished from Claude Garmond’s; sharper serifs and an almost wild vari­a­tion of axis and slope (fig. 4, 5).

Fig. 4. Top: 72 pt Mono­type Gara­mond, digital revival based on Jean Jannon’s cuts; bottom: 72 pt Adobe Gara­mond, dig­i­tally revived by Robert Slim­bach and based on Claude Garamond’s cuts.

Fig. 5. Top: 72 pt Simonici Gara­mond, another digital revival based on Jean Jannon’s cuts; bottom: 72 pt Stempel Gara­mond again, based on Claude Garamond’s cuts.

Historically befitting

So if you’re writing a piece on the intro­duc­tion of French print­ing and want to set it in an appro­pri­ate type­face, a Gara­mond revival is most apt—of course you could pick a heavy gothic with which Johann Heynlin and Guil­laume Fichet began France’s print­ing ven­tures but no one would com­fort­ably read it today (and ulti­mately the black­let­ters are more Ger­manic than French). Con­versely if you’re writing a piece set three cen­turies later, cov­er­ing the French Renai­sance, select one of Jannon’s revivals and pay tribute to a man almost for­got­ten by history.

Have a won­der­ful weekend every­one!