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Garamond is a group of many serif , named for sixteenth-century engraver Claude Garamond, generally spelled as Garamont in his lifetime. Garamond-style typefaces are popular and particularly often used for book printing and body text.
Garamond's types followed the model of an influential typeface cut for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius by his punchcutter Francesco Griffo in 1495, and are in what is now called the old-style of serif letter design, letters with a relatively organic structure resembling handwriting with a Quill pen, 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 italic type based on those created by his contemporary Robert Granjon, 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 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" 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, whose noticeably different work was for some years misattributed to Garamond. The most common digital font named Garamond is Monotype Garamond. Developed in the early 1920s and bundled with Microsoft Office, it is a revival of Jannon's work.
Besides general characteristics, writers on type have generally praised the even quality of Garamond's type: John A. Lane describes his work as "elegant and executed with consummate skill...to a higher standard than commercial interest demanded"; H. D. L. Vervliet 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 boldface 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, styled with variable height like lower-case letters.
The roman designs of Garamond which are his most imitated were based on a font cut around 1495 for the Venice printer Aldus Manutius by engraver Francesco Griffo. This was first used in the book De Aetna, a short work by poet and cleric Pietro Bembo which was Manutius' first printing in the Latin alphabet. Historian Beatrice Warde has assessed De Aetna as something of a Pilot experiment, 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 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, particularly respected for his Hebrew fonts, Pierre Haultin, Antoine Augereau (who may have been Garamond's master), Estienne's stepfather Simon de Colines 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 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'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 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 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.)
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 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.
Plantin's collection of original Garamond punches and matrices survives at the Plantin-Moretus Museum 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 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'.
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, which Vervliet describes as "deliciously daring" and have often been copied, for instance in Robert Slimbach's revivals for Adobe (discussed below).
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, Lyons and La Rochelle 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.
Seeing that for some time many persons have had to do with the art of 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, men I hear regretted every day Jannon ... and inasmuch as I could not accomplish this design for lack of types which I needed ... some would not, and others could not furnish me with what I lacked so I 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. 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 at a time when the French government had conceded through the Edict of Nantes 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 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 where he had been commissioned to do printing. (2023). 9789004209350, Brill. ISBN 9789004209350 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, 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.
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. (1987). 9780902692367, Oxford Polytechnic Press. ISBN 9780902692367 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 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.
Early revivals were often based directly on the Imprimerie nationale types, one of the first by Peignot and then by American Type Founders (ATF). These revivals could be made using pantograph Machining 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 technology of the period created increasing availability and demand for new fonts. Among hot metal typesetting companies, Monotype Imaging 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 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. (2006). 9780857730176, Bloomsbury. ISBN 9780857730176
In a 1926 paper published on the British typography journal The Fleuron, 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.)
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.
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.
Featuring a bold weight, small capitals, optional text figures and automatic ligature insertion, it is particularly popular in the TeX community and is also included on some Linux 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.
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.
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 type by Guillaume Le Bé, a large-size specimen of which he had Tschichold 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 Garamond types.
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.
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, Cyrillic and Greek language characters including Greek diacritics. 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".
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.
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 is the corporate font of Deutsche Bahn.
Monotype's artistic advisor Stanley Morison 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. (2023). 9781905865550, Ruthin Craft Centre. ISBN 9781905865550
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 that "I entertain very decided opinions about this latest of Mr. Goudy's achievements ... a comparison leaves me with a preference for our version."
This claim has been criticised as a misinterpretation of how typefaces are actually measured and what printing methods are desirable. Monotype Garamond, the version bundled with Microsoft Office, 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 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."
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