Typography term: Centered setting with decreasing line lengths

nina22 Jan 2014

Is there a term in English for this kind of setting often seen in historical books? Centered setting with decreasing line lengths to make a roughly triangular shape.
See attached example of a Dutch book from the middle of the 18th century; I know the Hipnerotomachia Poliphili has beautiful ones too.

nina22 Jan 2014#

Florian Hardwig pointed me to Haslam who calls this “tapered centring”. (German: Spitzkolumne) Thanks!

tmac23 Jan 2014#

I see that Hochuli and Kinross in "Designing Books" call it Tapered Setting. p 34. Pretty much the same as Florian pointed out.

Typography.Guru24 Jan 2014#

By the way: “Spitzkolumne” was used for any text block that didn’t fill the page, not just the ones ending in such a triangle.

Captured from commoncrawl.org on 21 Apr 2015. original URL