Claude Garamond

Claude Garamond
Claude Garamond

Claude Garamond (ca. 1490 – 1561)[1] was a French publisher from Paris. He was one of the leading type designers of his time, and is credited with the introduction of the apostrophe, the accent and the cedilla to the French language. Several contemporary typefaces, including those currently known as Garamond, Granjon, and Sabon, reflect his influence. Garamond was an apprentice of Simon de Colines; later, he was an assistant to Geoffroy Tory, whose interests in humanist typography and the ancient Greek capital letterforms, or majuscules, may have informed Garamond's later work.

Garamond came to prominence in 1541, when three of his Greek typefaces (e.g. the Grecs du roi (1541)) were requested for a royally-ordered book series by Robert Estienne. Garamond based these types on the handwriting of Angelo Vergecio, the King's Librarian at Fontainebleau, as well as that of his ten-year-old pupil, Henri Estienne. According to Arthur Tilley, the resulting books are "among the most finished specimens of typography that exist." Shortly thereafter, Garamond created the Roman types for which he would most be remembered, and his influence spread rapidly throughout and beyond France during the 1540s.

Garamond's name was originally rendered as "Garamont", but following the standardization of French spelling, the terminal 'd' became customary and stuck.

In 1621, sixty years after Garamond's death, the French printer Jean Jannon (1580–1635) created a type specimen with very similar attributes, though his letterforms were more asymmetrical, and had a slightly different slope and axis. Jannon's typefaces were lost for more than a century before their rediscovery at the National Printing Office of France in 1825, when they were wrongly attributed to Garamond. It was not until 1927, more than 100 years later, that Jannon's "Garamond" typefaces were correctly credited to him on the basis of scholarly research by Beatrice Warde. In the early 20th century, Jannon's types were used to produce a history of French printing, which brought new attention to French typography and to the "Garamond" type style. The modern revival of Claude Garamond's typography which ensued was thus inadvertently modeled on Jannon's outstanding work.[2]

Contents

See also

References

  1. ^ Bringhurst, Robert (2008). The Elements of Typographic Style. Vancouver, Canada: Hartley & Maks. pp. 337. ISBN 0-88179-205-5. 
  2. ^ Linotype: "What Makes a "Garamond" a Garamond?"

Sources

  • Tilley, Arthur (1900). "Humanism under Francis I". The English Historical Review 15 (59): 456–478. 
  • Lane, John A. (August 2005). "Claude Garamont and his Roman Type". In Adobe Systems (ed.). Garamond Premier Pro: A Contemporary Adaptation. Adobe Systems. pp. 5–13.  A survey of Claude Garamond's careerasd and typefaces, of Robert Granjon's italic types which were combined with Garamond roman types, and a brief summary of subsequent revivals through Garamond Premier Pro.
  • Kapr, Albert (1983) (in German). Schriftkunst. Geschichte, Anatomie und Schönheit der lateinischen Buchstaben. Munich. 

External links