Hi all:

I must confess I am a little downcast by the lack of responses to this thread.

To speak the truth, I have a great difficulty in telling apart 16th-17th century types. They all seem to be based on the same model and I honestly cannot tell the difference between, say, an Collines type from a Garamond one.

To complicate matters further, most of the Iberian 16th Century typography was based on that kind of design because the printing is so irregular - I often think revivals of these kind of types to be totally impossible.

Even if I can tell, at a glance and without looking at individual letters, most modern text types (sometimes even foundry variants of the same design, but that takes a little longer) when looking at a 16th Century book I find that terribly difficult - impossible, really. It is almost as if I had to try to gess the difference between Galliard cc and Galliard based on a page printed in a 150dpi inkjet printer.

Does anyone here have that feeling or did I post this thread in the wrong place?

Remember, I'm new here, so have a little patience while I understand the forum rules.

Rodrigo de S�

I think the problem may be that most of us here don't know much about identifying early printing types as opposed to 20th century and later.

Dear Mark:

Yes, that is probably the reason: I've been reading the posts in the various threads and the forum seems to be constituted by actual professionals (unlike me: I'm just a dilettante with a keen interest in books and types).
I�ll learn all the same, just by hanging around�

Thanks for your reply

Rodrigo de S�

I know that this thread is out of place, hence the lack of responses.

But I would like to tell people about my recent experiments.

I browsed - attentively - through a lot of 16th and 17th century books. I withdraw what I said about the great similarity of ancient fonts. They are subtly different, sometimes rather different from each other. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the Garamond kind of proportion and form was very widespread during the 16th and early 17th century.

Moreover, the wearing of the metal and the quality of paper and ink introduce very pronounced modifications in type made from the same matrices. This makes identification difficult.

As you know, 16th Century based types survived well into the 18th century in Iberia (that's Portugal and Spain). As I speak I have in front of me what seems to be a big version of Granjon's Galliard, published in Antwerpen in the first half of the 17th Century. But the Iberic type designers favoured what we now call Garalde up to the technical changes that appeared in the late 18th Century.

I know this is not very interesting for the majority of the forum members, but it just may interest someone (although the persistence of the Garalde types in Iberia is a well known fact).

Rodrigo de S�

Rodrigo,

I suppose your informed about the work of your fellow countryman Mario Feliciano, specially his earlier fonts. I think they were based on Updike samples and have the feeling your looking for.

Recently Andreu Balius did a digital version of a Pradell font, and perhaps is interesting to have a look at

http://www.andreubalius.com/andreubalius/type01_pradell.html

I have designed and produced a font based on some of the letters cut by Ger�nimo Gil for Don Quixote's Academia edition (those used in the front page and as initials all along the book), but it is not realeased as a commercial font yet.

Dear Jos�:

Yes, I know about M�rio Feliciano's work, but, as far as I know, he only made a serif font. It is rather good, I think. Pradell seems indeed in the same vein.

But actually I was thinking of quasi-Garamond type faces used as late as the early 18th Century. I don't have here a book I can scan (I do have one, but the paper is very fragile and I fear it would be damaged by scanning it). Nevertheless, next week I can try to get one. Most of them are at our family house and I keep very few of them in our town house.

Many late baroque Iberian books are extremely beautiful.

Thank you for your reply and your link.

Rodrigo de S�

Hi, Rodrigo,

The Spanish printing house _tf_ published some years ago a magazine which shows three faces designed by M�rio (sorry for my previous Mario, without the diacritic ;-) ) named Ger�nimo Gil Ibarra, Espinosa Ibarra and Pradell Ibarra. Perhaps you can contact M�rio directly.

There is a "Spanish" family called Columbus, but it doesn't look Spanish to my eyes...

http://www.fonts.com/

Anyway, I'm not an expert in historical faces.

jmc _=+

Dear Jos�:

Thank you for the information. I will try to get in contact with him. Thank you also for the link. I tend to agree with you: I find nothing particularly Spanish about the fonts... Marketing, perhaps?

Dear Tiffany:
If you think so, please do move it. And I agree with you: while it is not very difficult to make a modern version of, say, Le Romain du Roi, it is very difficult to know exactly how an Estienne or a Garamond was meant to be. Except if one copies the very large types, but then, as far as I know, these were generally made by the lesser technically endowed workers - hence their lack of proportion and crudity (I'm thinking of almost every old book I examined, but the often quoted title of Alphabetum Graecum by Garamond is an excellent example: the smaller sizes certainly look much better.

I sometimes wonder if it is possible, at all, to copy a true version of a small sized Garamond... As far as I can tell, there is no good modern version of it. Of course Stempel Garamond was based on research, but the Linotype restraints meant that the very characteristic f was quite altered and the overall hardness doesn't seem Garamond at all to me; 'Granjon' seems to me to lack character and Adobe Garamond is, I think, too soft, althout it is perhaps the version that more convincingly conveys the combination graceful curves and stately proportions of old Garamond. But then, perhaps I am wrong.

And, of course, most modern versions have smaller extenders than the old ones.

On the other hand, an old, well printed, book is a marvel to look at; the flow of letters is so graceful and yet so strong - tridimensional printing - that I cannot but be nostalgic about the past... Even if I welcome the technological changes that allowed a book to be acquired by most people.

Thank you for your offer.

Rodrigo de S�

What I meant by the conservative nature of Iberian typography may be seen here.

You will find an example of the Ascendonica italics (the origin of modern day Galliard italic) and its roman companion in a book published in Lisbon in 1650.

Rodrigo: thanks for posting the Iberian example. Those are some really beautiful letters, although I think it will be more challenging than usual to make a revival due to the rather extreme variations between multiple impressions of the same letter.

By the way, I have most of the Berner sheet at 1200 dpi. Follow the links from levien.com/type/berner/, then take off the "_sm". Be warned that files that large may well bring your computer to a grinding halt.

I'm in the process of moving the archive to tug.org, on which I won't have to worry so much about bandwidth, so all of the files will have high-res links.

Hope you still find it useful.

P.S. I understand Robert Slimbach is now working on an optically scaled version, to be called Garamond Masters if memory serves. It will probably be the definitive version when it's released, but fortunately there is lots of other good stuff from back then. I'm partial to the work of Guillaume LeBe, myself.

> I have most of the Berner sheet at 1200 dpi.

From the facsimile in Dreyfus, I presume?
If so, how close is that in texture and color to the original?

> It will probably be the definitive version

But will it have the terminal Northern California cuteness finally exorcised? We'll see.

hhp

From the facsimile in Dreyfus, I presume?
If so, how close is that in texture and color to the original?

Yes, from the Dreyfus. Sorry, I should have made that clear. I'm not sure how close it is to the original, not having seen it myself, but from what I can see it looks like an extremely careful an accurate reproduction. It certainly beats the reproduction in "A View of Early Typography", which suffers further from being reduced.

But will it have the terminal Northern California cuteness finally exorcised? We'll see.

Hey, I'm in Northern California! But I see what you mean. Let me put it this way: I'm not going to let the Adobe Garamond discorage me from working on my LeBe.

> Hey, I'm in Northern California!

I meant Slimbach. I'm sure he's much cuter than you.

hhp

Dear Ralph:

Thank you for the explanation. I have downloaded
a few samples. They make it very clear that Clau-
de Garamond was actually searching for regularity
which the Slimbach versionconveys rather well.

I must say I am not very critical on Slimbach's
work. If one prints text in 12 points we do get
the kind of dignified regularity a good Garamond
printed page offers.

Now, I agree it is a little too soft and not so
stately as true Garamond. But it is, I believe, by
far, the best modern day version we have.

I know about the masters version, and I am eagerly
waiting for it. But I fear it will not be much
different in terms of overall blandness.

As far as I know, Monotype is working on a similar
project involving Bembo. But it was meant to
appear this year and we are close to the end of
it. So perhaps they abandoned the project.

Concerning leBe, I never really saw a good photo
of it. But, as you say, in those days, there was
no shortage of good designs.

As a matter of fact, it strikes me that most
typefaces are variations of the same basic idea.
Of course Tory's faces are different from
Garamond's, but Garamond, leBe, COlinnes, all seem
to base their work on the same design.

I really think the proliferation of quite differ-
ent typefaces is something that really began at
the 20th century. Before that - say, in the 19th
Century - all types were more or less close to
the Didones; in the 17th Century most books look
more or less the same: printing differences are
more a matter of quality of type design and,
perhaps above all, of ink, paper, and pressing
quality than type design.

Concerning the particular type I illustrated, you
are quite right: what seems to have happened is
that there was some confusion and many different
designs were joined (for instance, consider the
variations on the [ o ]. Even the Ascendonica is
heterogeneous. There are many examples of foreign
gliphs - not in the example I have shown,
perhaps, but throughout the book.

If I find something of interest I will post it.
Old typography really is a fascinating matter.

Thank you for the replies.

Rodrigo