This is a fragment

The slate headstones of Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire are the glories of their churchyards. Much of the stone came from the quarries of Swithland in Leicestershire, which were worked until the later 19th century. The headstones are a nuisance to the incumbents of the churches, getting in the way of the machines that cut the grass neatly but often score the surface of the stones as they hit them; the sheep which browse in some country graveyards are a gentler and more effective alternative. Where they are not wholly destroyed, gravestones are dealt with in various ways: often by uprooting them and setting them against a wall, or by laying them flat so the mower can pass over them. One of the more devilishly practical solutions to the problems they pose is not only to lay the stones flat but to make a dry and convenient path to the church door with them.

None of these actions has much to recommend it. Slate, set upright so that it drains naturally, is resistant to weathering, and its grain permits the cutting of fine detail. It withstands even the acid rain of urban environments which eats away the limestones that are also used for gravestones. Uprooting the stones and placing them against a wall tears them away from association with the original graves they were set to mark. Laying them flat allows water to penetrate, so that as it freezes the stone is shattered into its natural layers. Worst of all, when they are used as paving stones, not only does the damp penetrate but the fine and delicate surface is destroyed by the accumulated grit that is pounded into it, grinding away the detail. It takes an insensitive personality to be indifferent to such treatment.

This is a fragment of a headstone from a churchyard in Nottinghamshire which had become a paving stone. It measures about 18 by 13 inches. It is a fragment because it appears to have been quite deliberately reduced to a quarter or less of its original size by blows from a heavy hammer which have removed from it the name and the dates of the person it was designed to commemorate and they have also truncated the verse that had been cut below.



We shall never know the name. As for the verse, with a glance at similar examples one can guess how it may have read:



When I first saw the stone I was distressed by the sight of the damage, and by the erosion of the design that was already visible and which would continue if it was left to lie where I found it. I went into the church. I forget what I said, but it got the result I least expected. The hapless verger (or whatever he was – possibly even the incumbent) asked if I would like to take it away and look after it. It was staggeringly heavy. But somehow I got it back home and it now stands safely upright, as it had done originally, with what is left of its beautifully-cut message washed clean by the rain and often lit by sunshine.

That was a long time ago. Should I have accepted the offer? I do not think I could have removed a stone which still bore the name of a parishioner who had lived nearby, but it seemed to be worth doing something to preserve this anonymous fragment. Although I shall not name the church, I see that its current web page offers admiring tributes to the few, widely-spaced tombs that have been allowed to stay in its churchyard, and even has the temerity to praise their lettering. An image posted on Flickr in 2008 shows that the path to the door of the church is still made up of incised slate headstones.

The church must do what it can to look after itself, but it seems to me that there is a more wide-ranging and worthwhile question to be asked. Why, since by common consent this lettering belongs to a tradition of such quality, have letter-cutters let it die out?

I don’t want to see a flood of weak pastiches of the original vernacular idiom. (The work of Gill’s contemporaries, and of his pupils too, are reminders to us that there were very few who could ever string the bow of Odysseus.) But I should be glad to see some evidence in the work of modern artists that they are aware that we have a durable legacy from the date of this fragment from Nottinghamshire, which I guess to be about 1760, the period of the work of the letter-cutter, typefounder and printer, John Baskerville.

Caractères de l’Université

This type on a body of about 18 points appears in the big type specimen book of the Imprimerie Royale, Paris, 1845. It is the first known published reappearance of the type by Jean Jannon of Sedan for which matrices had been acquired by the Imprimerie Royale in 1641, and the first text to link it to the name of Garamont.

It is a detail of a table headed Spécimen des caractères romains employés par l’Imprimerie Royale, de 1640 à 1846 – yes, ‘1846’, although the title page of the book has the date 1845. The table, showing roman and italic types of three centuries, is spread across facing pages.


It appears, paradoxically, in a long preliminary section on non-Latin types, not on romans and italics, headed ‘Notice sur les types étrangers du spécimen de l’Imprimerie royale’. The text and the table were reprinted from the same types as a book with this title in 1847, making a volume that is easier to find in libraries. The table from this reprint is familiar to readers of Updike’s Printing types, where it appears as his fig. 327. But as Updike reproduced it both the heading and a final panel on the right with descriptive notes on the types were omitted. Updike’s caption is ‘Comparative table of types used by the French National Printing House from its foundation to 1825’, a date that was derived from the heading to the last column, ‘Types gravés par M. Marcellin Legrand. 1825’.

The present post is not much more than a footnote, albeit a rather long and involved one, to one or two others in this blog that have been dedicated during the last year in different ways to Claude Garamont (d. 1561) and to some of the types that have borne his name. I have repeated one or two images from them, together with some passages that I have already quoted in the earliest and longest post, but which may be difficult to find, in an attempt to offer some explanation for one of the remaining unsolved puzzles connected to them: the types of Jean Jannon are often referred to as if their original and proper title was caractères de l’Université. Was this true? And what did the phrase mean?

The description of the type in the specimen of 1845, omitted from Updike’s illustration, is linked to the note reference (1), and it runs as follows:

(1) L’existence de ces types, qu’on désignait sous le nom de caractères de l’Université, remonte aux premières années du XVIe siècle. La date que l’on donne ici est celle de l’établissement de l’Imprimerie royale, qui fit usage de ces caractères jusqu’à l’époque où ils purent être remplacés par les types de Louis XIV.

(These types, which were known by the name ‘types of the University’, date from the first years of the 16th century. The date given here [1640] is that of the establishment of the Imprimerie royale, which used these types until the time when they could be replaced by the types of Louis XIV [the romain du roi].)

This is the beginning of a long and confused story.

As I have noted elsewhere, a set of matrices for three sizes of roman and italic types, for the modern bodies of 18, 24 and 36 points, was bought by Cramoisy, the director of the Imprimerie royale, from Jean Jannon in March 1641. This purchase, which was unknown to Beatrice Warde (and which makes nonsense of a part of her narrative of 1926) was first reported in the catalogue of an exhibition, L’art du livre à l’Imprimerie nationale, held at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, in 1951. The catalogue entry did not give the cote or call number of the document in the Archives nationales in Paris relating to the purchase, but it was supplied by H.-J. Martin in his study of printing in Paris in the 17th century published in 1969: it is Ét. XLIII, liasse 32.



The document names Six frappes de matrice assauoir gros et petitz canons, gros parangons, et leurs istalicques, auecq trois moulles pour fondre les caracteres desdictes six frappes (six sets of matrices for Gros and Petit Canon, Gros Parangon, and their italics, with three moulds to cast types from these six sets of matrices).

The term caractères de l’Université does not appear in this document, nor has it been found in any other of this period. In the inventory of the materials of the Imprimerie royale made in 1691 (BnF, MS nouv. acq. fr. 2511) the matrices are listed correctly by their sizes, but the term caractères de l’Université does not appear. As I have noted in a previous post, only the two smaller italic types of Jannon, for Petit Canon and Gros Parangon, appear ever to have been used by the Imprimerie royale, and I have found no use during the 17th century of either the roman or the italic of Gros Canon, nor of the two smaller romans.

In 1828, the Imprimerie royale having accumulated some very mixed materials including some imported from England, an inventory was drawn up under the authority of its director, the Baron de Villebois. It is in a series of volumes with the printed title Recueil des empreintes des poinçons et des matrices des caractères français et exotiques … existans à l’Imprimerie royale, which are kept with the original punches and matrices in the Cabinet des Poinçons at the Atelier du livre d’art et de l’estampe, the ‘craft division’ of the Imprimerie nationale de France that was set up in 2005 at at Ivry-sur-Seine. For types for which there were no punches, like those of Jannon, impressions from cast types appear to have been made in ink, by hand.



Volume I of the inventory begins with an account of les caractères dits de l’Université (‘the types known as those of the University’) and those of Luce, with a note that both types were hors de service (not in current use). This is the reference at the foot of the title page:



This is the first known use of this term caractères de l’Université in connection with the type of Jannon. It is also the first known modern showing of these types.

Apart from those for non-Latin types like Garamont’s greeks, these matrices from Jannon were the only old materials in the collection of the Imprimerie royale. According to the author of the section on roman types in the specimen of the Imprimerie royale, 1845 (who was apparently F. A. Duprat, the chef du service in charge of its type foundry), ‘when the royal printing-office was set up, it had been furnished with types that were cut for the use of the printers of Paris’, types of which the origin dated back to King François I (reigned 1515–47), and which were ‘attributed to Garamont’. These were used until new types (the romain du roi) were made to the order of Louis XIV especially for the use of his printing-office. This is the passage:

Lorsqu’en 1640 Louis XIII, agissant sous l’inspiration du Cardinal Richelieu, fit établir une imprimerie dans le palais du Louvre, on l’approvisionna de caractères gravés pour les imprimeurs de Paris. On continua de se servir de ces caractères, dont l’origine remontait à François Ier, et qu’on attribuait à Garamont, jusqu’à la fin du XVIIe siècle, époque à laquelle Louis XIV ordonna qu’une typographie spéciale serait gravée pour le service de son imprimerie.

An early specimen of the types of the Imprimerie royale dated 1643 (of which a facsimile was published in 1958) shows that this was a fair summary: the types used at the Imprimerie royale were those of Garamont, Granjon and other punchcutters of the 16th century that were still in common use in Paris, and which were available, newly cast from old matrices, from several typefounders. Only the two smaller italics cast from the matrices of Jannon were added to this material and used occasionally.

Duprat’s contemporary and a rival historian of the royal printing office, Auguste Bernard (1811–68), a printer’s son with some experience of work with Firmin Didot and as a proof-reader at the Imprimerie royale, was less careful in his wording. He wrote in his history of the Imprimerie royale (1867),

Les premieres caractères dont se servit l’Imprimerie royale, et dont on conserve les matrices, sont attribués à Garamond, célèbre graveur du seizième siècle, auquel on doit les types grecs de François Ier. Ils sont connus sous le nom de caractères de l’université. Leur forme est très gracieuse.

(‘The first types that the Imprimerie royale used, and of which the matrices are preserved, are attributed to Garamond, the celebrated punchcutter of the 16th century to whom we owe the greek types of François I. They are known by the name of caractères de l’université. Their forms are very elegant.’)

Here we see the old types still in regular use by printers in Paris being attributed to Garamont and also linked to the one set of surviving early matrices, those that we now know to be by Jannon, which had not been acquired until 1641, a year after the initiation of the Imprimerie royale, and which lay for many years, unused, in the stock of the typographic materials of the Imprimerie royale.

Now Duprat had not said anything as appreciative. Indeed in a little book that he wrote on the history of the royal printing office, published in 1848, he remarked,

... les types dont se servait alors l’Imprimerie royale, et dont elle continua de faire usage jusqu’aux premières années du xviiie siècle, manquaient de pureté et d’élegance. A cette époque, l’Imprimerie royale ne possédait pas de types spéciaux; elle employait les mêmes caractères que ceux dont se servaient les imprimeurs de Paris, et qu’on désignait sous le nom de caractères de l’Université.

(The types that were used at this time by the Imprimerie royale, and which it continued to use until the beginning of the 18th century, lacked purity and elegance. At this date the Imprimerie royale had no special types of its own, but employed those that were used by the Printers of Paris, and which were known as the caractères de l’Université.)

It should be noted that Duprat is saying here that the ordinary types used by the printers in Paris were those that were known as the caractères de l’Université.

We have other testimony that helps to confirm the remark. In 1756, in an anonymous letter, generally attributed to Fournier le jeune, in the Journal des Sçavans (Oct 1756, p. 660), it is said that from the time of Cramoisy to that of Rigault (its directors from the date of its foundation in 1640 until 1707), the Imprimerie royale used only the types that were in use in the University, which were cast for it by the ordinary typefounders at the same price that other printers paid. These foundries – wrote the author – were mostly those of Sanlecque, Le Bé and Cot. If they used matrices that were royal property (presumably a reference to the grec du roi by Garamont, the use of which was jealously protected) they made out a receipt for them.

(‘Depuis Cramoisi, premier directeur de cet Imprimerie jusqu’à M. Rigault, on n’employa point d’autre caractères que ceux qui étoient en usage dans l’Université; on les faisoit faire par les Fondeurs ordinaires & au même prix que les autres Imprimeurs. S’il arrivoient qu’on fournit les matrices qui appartenoient au Roy, le Fondeur en donnoit son recepissé. C’étoient ordinairement les Fonderies des Sanlecque, le Bé, & Cot, qui avoient cet pratique.’)

The foundry of Cot was acquired by Claude Lamesle, whose specimen of 1742 gives the most spectacular view that was published during the 18th century of the types of the 16th-century masters, newly cast from original matrices. (There is a facsimile reprint of the specimen and an online version, but neither of them quite conveys the stunning sharpness of the types shown in the real thing.)

‘In use at the University’. What does this mean? Since long before the use of printing, the University in Paris had a history of relationships with the makers of books, approving and controlling the quality of the texts that were made and their prices. The printers in Paris, whose numbers were strictly limited, were largely confined to the the district round the rue St. Jacques, which was also that of the complex of university buildings, and the connection yielded to them certain privileges. How this could extend to types is far from clear.

The same term was used by a contemporary of Fournier’s. In the ‘Avertissement’ to his Essai d’une nouvelle typographie (1771) Louis Luce, an independent typefounder who had deen designated graveur du roi (punchcutter to the king) in succession to his uncle Jean Alexandre, wrote,

Mes Caracteres différent aussi de ceux de l’Université & des Caracteres de Hollande, tant par la délicatesse de leurs empattemens que par l’harmonie qui regne dans leur forme.

(‘The features that differentiate my types from those of the University and from the types of Holland are the delicacy of their serifs and their overall harmony of form.’)

In both passages, by Fournier and Luce, it looks as if the term ‘types of the University’ is being used, as Duprat did, to mean simply the traditional types that were in common use. Perhaps the term means no more than the fact that they were used in academic publications. However, if ‘types of the University’ was a specialized term that conveys a precise meaning to historians of the Parisian book trade, and if a source can be cited, I shall be glad to be told of it, and I will publish it here.

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.

It is a maxim among the curators of museum collections that if an artefact has survived intact and unblemished, it can be presumed that either it never worked or that it was rarely used. This was true of Plantin’s collection of old matrices, and was also the case with those of Jannon, which (as I observed in an earlier post) had hardly ever been used by the Imprimerie royale, even in the 17th century, and which can be presumed to have been in excellent condition in the 19th, when they were proclaimed by historians – mistakenly, but for reasons that one can understand – to be authentic relics of the types of the 16th century, the heroic age of printing in Paris.

In other words, it was the miscellaneous collection of older types by Garamont, Granjon and others, that were in regular use by Parisian printers, to which the term of caractères de l’université was first applied in the 18th century, and not specifically to those of Jannon, the matrices of which had been a misguided purchase, hardly used, and the existence of which had long been forgotten. However, the phrase used by Bernard in 1867, leur forme est très gracieuse, echoes sentiments that had begun to be felt by English as well as French printers who had become aware of the charm of older types. Louis Perrin in Lyon lamented that the words of his beloved 16th-century poets no longer seemed the same when they were set in rigidly perfect contemporary types. And so where original matrices still survived, the types of Caslon and indeed those made at Oxford for John Fell were brought back into use for suitable texts, and new types – like the Basle roman of the Chiswick Press or the new caractères anciens of Jeannet in Paris – were cut in imitation of the old ones.

I might take the opportunity of ending this post with a passage written by Arthur Christian.

Lorsqu’en 1895 j’eus l’honneur d’être choisi ... pour diriger l’Imprimerie nationale. ... on parlait déjà de l’Exposition de 1900; j’avais donc à me préoccuper de faire un livre constituant à la fois et un effort de la typographie et une œuvre utile; je songeai à l’histoire de l’Imprimerie et m’en ouvris à M. Claudin. ... L’Histoire de l’Imprimerie en France a été composée en caractères Garamond, dont l’Imprimerie nationale possède les matrices. Je me félicite d’avoir fait ainsi revivre ces types admirables, qui ont servi pour l’impression de l’Imitation de Jésus-Christ, premiere volume que l’Imprimerie royale ait fait paraître en 1640.

(In 1895, when I had the honour to be chosen to direct the Imprimerie nationale, the Exhibition of 1900 was already under discussion. I needed to make a book that would be both useful and an outstanding production. The history of printing came to my mind and I talked to M. Claudin. His Histoire de l’Imprimerie en France was set in Garamond types, of which the Imprimerie nationale has the matrices. I am proud to have revived these splendid types, which were used to print the Imitatio Christi, the first volume produced by the royal printing-office in 1640.)

This text, from Christian’s lectures, Origines de l’imprimerie en France (1900), is quoted by Linda Ritson in her admirable study, ‘Arthur Christian, Director of the Imprimerie nationale, 1895–1906’ (Signature, n.s. 9, 1949, pp. 3–28). The passage catches Christian’s righteous pride in his part in making these types ‘live again’, but it is unreliable in two respects. The text of Claudin’s book and its title page were in fact set wholly in the ‘Grandjean’ type (the romain du roi); only the brief Avant-propos and Preface were set in the ‘Garamond’ types. The Imitatio Christi of 1640 was not set in the Jannon types for which the Imprimerie nationale did not yet have the matrices but in the Gros Canon of Garamont, with headings in an italic of the same size by Robert Granjon, both of which were types that appeared in the specimen of 1643 and which would be much used at the Imprimerie royale during the next few decades. These were presumably among the commonly available types that were known as caractères de l’Université.

The main point of this post is that, the original sixteenth-century matrices for roman and italic types in the possession of the founders in Paris having all been destroyed as a consequence of the revolution in typography associated with the family of Didot, 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.


Sources

There is no single historical narrative relating to the Imprimerie nationale, listing all printed and manuscript sources. One of the nearest things to a published list of the earlier sources may possibly be, for all its limitations, the piece I published on ‘Type specimens of the Imprimerie royale 1643–1828’ (Bulletin du bibliophile, 1, 2002, pp. 70–99) in which I also did my best to list the various inventories.

The only formal histories are those of F. A. Duprat, Histoire de l’Imprimerie impériale de France, 1861, and of Auguste Bernard, Histoire de l’Imprimerie royale du Louvre, 1867, the narrative of which runs only to the end of the Ancien Régime. (A pdf version can be found online.) The catalogue of the exhibition, L’Art du livre à l’Imprimerie nationale (Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, 1951) is useful, though it has many omissions and errors. H.-J. Martin was among the compilers. A volume of collected essays with the same title, including some important contributions to its history by specialists, was issued in 1975.

The inventories that are most relevant to the subject of this post are the volumes mentioned above, made to the order of Villebois in 1827 and completed in 1828, which are kept at Ivry. There is a further inventory at Ivry which has a printed title: Inventaire du matériel de l’Imprimerie royale au 31 décembre 1838. (It has a spine label reading ‘Inventaire du matériel de l’Imprimerie royale au 1er janvier 1839, and a handwritten note on the printed title page, reading ‘Déposé aux Archives de la Chancellerie le 23 mars 1840’). This includes an account – shown below – of the materials for what had by now become known habitually, if misguidedly, as the caractères de l’Université. Neither of these inventories attributes the types to Garamont. The smallest size, the Gros Parangon, now cast on an 18-point body, is here labelled ‘Gros Romain’.



It should be kept in mind that the national printing office in France has not only had many different names but also several changes of address, having been established in the palace of the Louvre in 1640 but split into different divisions during the Revolution. These were brought together in the Marais district of Paris during the 19th century, set up in a new building in the 15th arondissement early in the 20th century, and the materials of the Cabinet des Poinçons, and the traditional ‘craft’ activities like punchcutting and letterpress printing, were moved in 2005 to the rented industrial premises shown below at Ivry-sur-Seine to become the Atelier du livre d’art et de l’estampe. At each move, some forgotten things were rediscovered and it is possible that others were discarded.



A further and perhaps final move of the whole establishment to a location in Normandy, to the site of the publishing archive IMEC (Institut Mémoires de l'édition contemporaine) near Caen, has been planned for some time and publicly discussed. A letter approving the project in principle has been published, addressed by President Sarkozy in 2008 to Jack Lang (Minister of Culture to President Mitterand, and the current head of IMEC). But Sarkozy is no longer president of France, and so far as I am aware details of the move have yet to be confirmed.

Portrait of Bodoni?

Was the sitter for this portrait Giambattista Bodoni, whose name was written on the back? And can we believe the claim that the artist was Andrea Appiani (1754–1817)? Appiani’s well known painting of Bodoni, which is in the galleria nazionale at Parma, is familiar from the engraving of it by Francesco Rosaspina which is the frontispiece to the first volume of the 1818 edition of the Manuale tipografico, shown below.

Perhaps this text should have said more about the original when the image was first posted. The portrait, painted on a wooden board measuring 49 by 39 centimetres, does indeed bear the names of Giambattista Bodoni as sitter, and Andrea Appiani as the artist, written in ink on the reverse, apparently by more than one hand.

The painting had been acquired during a visit to Europe by Muir Dawson, of Los Angeles, California, a dealer in books on printing and examples of fine printing. A. L. Van Gendt, publisher of Amsterdam, had bought it from the book dealer Commin of Bournemouth. In 1965 Dawson was in correspondence about the portrait with Robert F. Lane, a resident of New York and an outstandingly well-informed specialist on the work of Bodoni. In 1964 Lane had already received enquiries by letter about the picture from its current owner, R. C. Hatchwell, a bookseller of Little Somerford, Chippenham, Wiltshire. As he told Dawson, Lane did not think it represented Bodoni. Others, noting the lack of resemblance to the figure with a well-nourished face in more familiar portraits, have had the same reaction.

Being puzzled to know what to do with the portrait, with its lack of a reliable attribution or provenance, in October 1968 Dawson and Van Gendt presented it jointly to the St Bride Printing Library, as it was then known, with an invitation to discover more about it, if that should be possible.

I am afraid that nothing more has come to light. The direct trail, if it ever existed, became a cold one. But since next year, 2013, is the 200th anniversary of Bodoni’s death, which will be marked with an event in Parma, it seems to me that if it can be done, it is about time to try to resolve the doubts relating to this ‘portrait’, or at least to discover its provenance. After all, it is now possible to publish the image and its associated story more widely than ever before. By indexing this post, Google has now placed it among the images produced by a search for ‘Bodoni portrait’. Information relating to this painting will be welcome.

The types of Jean Jannon at the Imprimerie royale

It is well known that the ‘Garamond’ types, of which the use was initiated at the Imprimerie nationale, Paris, during first years of the 20th century, included some that had been cast from a set of early matrices for three sizes of roman and italic known as the caractères de l’Université to which the name ‘Garamond’ or ‘Garamont’ was assigned during the 19th century (for the first time, apparently, in the specimen of the Imprimerie royale, 1845), and to which several other sizes were added by professional punchcutters, notably Hénaffe. During the 1920s these types were attributed to Jean Jannon of Sedan in an article under the pseudonym of Paul Beaujon in volume 5 (1926) of The Fleuron by Beatrice Warde. Her claim was based on their appearance in Jannon’s type specimen book of 1621 in the Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris.

The types appeared for the first time under the name of ‘Garamond’ as a ‘series’ in the specimen of the Imprimerie nationale dated 1904 (shown above), and they would become the models for the ‘Garamond’ types of American Type Founders (about 1917), and the English Monotype Corporation (1922).

The story has been told in many places. My own version was in an essay that I published in 2006, and which forms a part of the very long and involved post with the title ‘Garamond or Garamont’ in this blog, which first appeared in April 2011 and to which many additions and corrections have been made ever since. There is also a separate section on Jannon in the new Garamont website of the French Ministry of Culture, although this is in need of some fine-tuning. As we both note, the term caractères de l'Université does indeed appear to have been introduced in the inventory of 1827 or 1828, a record of the punches and matrices of the Imprimerie royale with a printed title page dated 1828, now kept at Ivry. But I have seen no attribution of this type to ‘Garamont’ earlier than the one that appears in the Imprimerie royale specimen of 1845. It seemed to me that for those who have found the navigation of the elaborate narrative that appears in the previous post rather laborious, it would be helpful to offer a summary of some recent findings of my own, so that is my chief aim here.

In 1922 D. B. Updike published the image that appears at the head of this post as fig. 172 of the first edition (1922) of his Printing types, their history, forms and use. It shows a part of a leaf from Richelieu’s text, Les Principaux points de la foy catholique défendus, a folio printed at the Imprimerie royale in 1642. Updike’s caption identifies the types as Garamond’s on the basis of the belief that was current in 1922. In later editions, in deference to Beatrice Warde, the types were called ‘Jannon’s’, an identification that was not wholly correct. The object of this piece is to set things as nearly right as possible.

Perhaps the best place to begin is with the pair of larger types that appears in Updike’s figure. The roman can be identified as the Petit Canon of Robert Granjon, a type that is listed by Vervliet in his Conspectus of 2010 as type 140. (It had appeared on the Berner specimen sheet of 1592, where like the other romans it was identified as the work of ‘Garamond’, but on a specimen offered by Guillaume II Le Bé to the Plantin printing-office in about 1599 there is a note stating that it was cut by Granjon.) This is a type that appears in the specimen of the Imprimerie royale dated 1643, of which a facsimile with notes by Jeanne Veyrin-Forrer and André Jammes was issued in 1958. (Bibliographical details of this specimen and the facsimile are given in the ‘Garamond or Garamont’ post above.) The italic is indeed the Petit Canon italic of Jean Jannon, and it is one of two italics by him which are shown in the specimen of 1643.

Matrices for three sizes of roman and italic types were bought from Jannon by the director of the Imprimerie royale in 1641, the Gros Canon, Petit Canon and Gros Parangon, types that were later cast on bodies of 36-, 24- and 18-points. The relevant document (from which an image was shown in my first blog relating to Garamond/Garamont) is the contract between Jean Jannon and Sébastien Cramoisy dated 1 March 1641 (Archives nationales, Paris, Étude XLIII, liasse 32). The question to which I addressed myself during the later months of 2011 was, ‘which of the types by Jean Jannon named in this document were used during the 17th century at the Imprimerie royale’?

I looked at many examples of printing at the Imprimerie royale held by the British Library, mostly making use of the list of titles printed in his historical study by Auguste Bernard: ‘Catalogue chronologique des Éditions de l’Imprimerie royale du Louvre’, Histoire de l’Imprimerie royale du Louvre (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1867), pp. 123–256. My conclusions were as follows:

I found no example of roman types by Jannon in use at the Imprimerie royale. Two sizes of the italics appear, the Petit Canon and the Gros Parangon, accompanying roman types by other hands. Neither the roman nor the italic of the Jannon Gros Canon, the largest of the three sizes, has been found in use at the Imprimerie royale during the 17th century.

To say that I found this a surprising result is an understatement. Like most of his readers (I imagine), I had accepted the appreciative estimation of Jannon by Henri-Jean Martin that I had cited in my earlier post:

‘This man was the worthy follower of the typographical artists and technicians of the century before. One can see appreciation of his efforts in the fact that types cast in the matrices that he sold to the Imprimerie royale were used in the splendid works printed during the early years of this institution.’

(Cet homme était le digne émule des artistes et des techniciens de la typographie du siècle précédent. On pourrait peut-être voir la consécration de ses efforts dans le fait qu’on fondit sur des matrices portant l’empreinte des ses types et par lui vendues à l’Imprimerie royale, les caractères utilisés pour les plus luxueux ouvrages publiés par cet établissement à ses débuts. Livre, pouvoirs et société à Paris au XVIIe siècle, 1969, p. 367.)

Martin’s remarks were elegantly expressed and based on a logical inference, but they appear to be wrong. The types used at the Imprimerie royale during the years following its creation until the end of the century, when the new romain du roi was made, were mostly the ‘classic’ romans of Claude Garamont and italics of Robert Granjon that had been used by Parisian printers for many decades. They appear in the specimen of the Imprimerie royale dated 1643, and the source seems likely to have been Parisian foundries that were well furnished with matrices for these types, of which there were several. In summary it can be said that only two italic types by Jannon appear to have been used at the Imprimerie royale, where they accompany older types, and none of the romans.

Two pieces of printed evidence seem to support my conclusion. One is the fact that only these two Jannon italic types, and none of the romans, appear in the Imprimerie royale specimen of 1643.

All three sets of roman and italic matrices were mentioned as being present in ‘drawers’ (layettes) in an inventory of the materials of the Imprimerie royale drawn up in 1691 (BnF, MS nouv. acq. fr. 2511), but when in 1690 the widow of the director Sébastien Mabre-Cramoisy prepared specimens of the types from matrices ‘belonging to the king’ to be passed to his successor, in addition to five sheets of greek types lettered A to E (the grecs du roi), there was a single sixth sheet, lettered F, a detail from which is shown above, showing only the two smaller italics of Jannon that appear to have been in regular use.

Several questions are raised by my claims, which were the basis of papers that I gave at colloques relating to Garamont at Amiens in September 2011, and in New York in January 2012. Have I overlooked examples of the use of Jannon types (especially the romans) at the Imprimerie royale? Since it is not easy to prove a negative, that is possible; and one reason for offering my own observations in this form is in order to invite others to make their own and to let me know what they find or to publish them.

One the matter of the Jannon type specimen dated 1621, perhaps I should include this note.

In his little pamphlet of 1887 Brincourt appears to be the first writer to mention it as a specimen of types. (There is an oddly garbled reference in the Bigmore & Wyman Bibliography of printing (1880) where it is listed, evidently by someone who had not seen it, as ‘a very interesting work on the few (qy. seven) but admirable editions in 12mo, printed at Sedan'.) Warde appears to have been using the copy in the Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris, the only one now known and the original of the facsimile published in 1927. In 1887 Brincourt wrote, ‘ce cahier, intitulé: “Espreuve des caractères nouvellement taillez,” est de la plus grande rareté: on y trouve la reproduction de tous les caractères nouveaux, y compris la Nompareille et la Sedanaise avec son Italique.’ And in the later printings of Brincourt’s text (1902, etc.), there is a reference to a copy, without any indication of its whereabouts, as ‘In-4° de 6 ff. pour le titre et de l’Avis “aux Imprimeurs”, plus 10 ff. pour les “Caracteres nouuellement taillez”. But in the copy at the Bibliothèque Mazarine there appear to be only seven leaves which show types, and they do not include either the roman or italic of Nompareille or Sedanaise, although both sizes are named on the leaf of two-line letters. Can Brincourt have seen another and a more complete copy of the specimen, and if so where is it?

Type held in the hand

Type, as we know, is something that you can pick up and hold in your hand. But there are fewer opportunities for doing this now than ever before, and our fading familiarity with the way type was made in the past can make for puzzles that are not easy to resolve.

Harry Carter’s phrase with which he began the lectures that became A view of early typography (1969), ‘Type is something that you can pick up and hold in your hand’, was a reproach to bibliographers whose attention was so occupied by the marks they saw on paper that they were not always much concerned about the means by which the solid types that made them were created and how this had affected the way they looked. The reproach was not always deserved, even when it was addressed to bibliographers isolated in their libraries. Making type was traditionally a secretive trade and difficult to penetrate.

In recently using a post to praise Talbot Baines Reed’s work as a historian I observed that his notes on the evidence for the shape of early types are still useful, and that they were retained with little alteration by his editor in the edition of 1952. But there is scarcely any reference in his original edition of 1887 to the way in which type was being made then – in what can now be seen to have been fateful years, when mechanization began to change the normal stance of the setter of texts from standing at a pair of cases to sitting at a keyboard.

It is often in my mind, when I use Reed’s book, that it would have been helpful if he had recorded more of the everyday operation of his typefoundry and added a note on the way it was changing. Notwithstanding some of the new techniques that had crept insidiously into regular use, like the use of the machines that had taken over the work of most of the casters with the hand mould and the electrotyping that had become a process for making many of the matrices, he must have been well aware that most of the operations of his own foundry had not changed in centuries. It still held one of the major surviving collections of early materials, the larger part of which were still usable, and the work of the casters and dressers had hardly changed. In the collective memory of the workmen there was a store of unwritten knowledge of how things had once been done.

Now we are well aware that not only has our own access to this tradition almost slipped away from us, but nobody today is quite sure, since metal types are not going to return, how we can preserve the embarrassingly rich stores of historical punches and matrices that have survived so far. The technical skills of those who understood the trades of the caster and the punchcutter, which were passed to the next generation by example and word of mouth and which would help us to understand exactly what we have left to us and how it was used, are now almost beyond our reach, even if we can find the individual sets of punches and matrices that we may be seeking among those that are stored.

I write this bit of sermonizing, not for the first time, to try to give some dignity to a post that might otherwise seem to deal with trivia. Its subject – some details of the way type looks, and why – is one that has been in my mind since I noticed that the typefounder’s mould in the image published in the Diderot Encyclopédie would actually make type with the nick ‘below’ the letter, just like modern type in English-speaking places, and not in the French manner.

The nick (see the image at the head of this post) tells the compositor whether all the type in the line is the right way up or not, and it distinguishes p from d in the case. The nick is visible to the compositor and it can be felt with the thumb, reassuringly, as the type is set. But French type usually has the nick ‘on top’, or at the back when it is placed in the composing stick. Fournier le jeune labours the point in a long section on the cran, or nick, in his Manuel typographique. Moreover, there is this image in the Encyclopédie, in the section on printing, that shows some large types which have their nick ‘on top’, in the French manner, as we would expect.

But what exactly does the Encyclopédie itself tell us? There is a whole article, a brief one, headed cran, which is included in Giles Barber’s admirable collection of selected materials from it on the making of books which was published in 1973. The piece is carefully worded, giving the function of the nick, but managing not to offer an opinion regarding which side of the types the nick should be. This (in my words) is what it says:

“Nick, a term of the typefounder, is a small indentation in the body of type which tells which way up it is. The compositor who takes care to place the nick of each piece of type on the same side is sure that they are all in the right orientation. The nick is on top or below, according to the country, and the choice of the printer.”

Fournier himself acknowledged that although the nick was ‘on top’ in France it was on the other side in Holland, Flanders, Germany and the ‘Lyonnais’ – the district round Lyon, the city that had been one of the major centres of printing in France. He says nothing about England, but then he had no knowledge of founders’ practice there. As Bodoni’s surviving moulds show, types in Italy had the nick ‘below’, like those in England.

Hence the puzzle of this diagram in the Encyclopédie, below. It is fig. 2 of plate II of the section on ‘typefounding’ (Fonderie des caracteres).

It shows the ‘upper half’ of the mould, with the matrix pushed up to the ‘stool’ and its lower part projecting. The impression of the punch is not shown on the matrix as it should be, but there is no doubt that type it cast would have the nick ‘below’, in the English manner, where the compositor could see and feel it.

Even if the diagram is intended to show a kind of universal mould, with an orientation that would be familiar in many countries and not just one, it contradicts what one has learned of the French custom. Since the image among the engravings of the Encyclopédie that illustrate the article on printing (above) show big types with the nick on top, or at the back, is there a contradiction to resolve? What other evidence have we of the general practice in France?

We have in fact the advantage of an earlier treatise, the account of typefounding that was prepared by Jacques Jaugeon for the so-called ‘Description des Arts et Métiers’ with the authority of the Academy of Sciences. Its image of the mould, engraved by Louis Simonneau in 1694 (below), shows the nick on top. The closed mould is on the left, with the bottom end of the matrix, to which a piece of leather has been tied, projecting from it. The image in the centre shows the other end of the matrix, with a piece of cast type, with its nick ‘on top’ and the projecting ‘jet’ of surplus metal, still in place.

In fact the surviving iconography goes further. In the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal there is a series of pen and wash sketches relating to typefounding that were probably drawn in the 1690s and intended for the engraver. They tell us more about the look of type than any other images of that date. Here is a large letter A.

Sure enough, the nick is ‘at the back’ in English terms. Moreover the projecting lower part of the type body has been shaved away at an angle with a plane, (‘bearded’ to use the English word), so that it would not pick up ink and print by accident.

Here is a view of the same letter seen from the side, showing the bearding clearly, and also something that the first sketch left out. The angles on either side of the A have been shaved, to eliminate the risk that these sharp projecting corners would pick up ink and print by accident. The feature that was left out has been added to both images. It is labelled in this one as the goutiere or ‘gutter’ (modern French gouttière), that is the ‘groove’ made with a plane in the foot of the type in order to remove the projection that may be left by the surplus metal that is broken off after it is cast, so that just two ‘feet’ are left, the feature (a brilliantly simple one) that gave each piece of cast type a uniform height. (The image above from the Encyclopédie shows these features too, though the bearding is not so well drawn.)

Details like bearding apart, we can be fairly sure that type of 1700 was not unlike the product of more recent techniques of casting and dressing, and that some of its details were innovations that were not features of very early types. It was nearly an inch high, as type seems always to have been – a nicely calculated size for something big enough to be picked up and assembled by hand and to lock itself into a solid forme. Here are types for text setting that were part of a purchase made in the 1670s by the University Press at Oxford with the help of the scholar Francis Junius, showing their nick and groove.

They are for a German Schwabacher for an ‘English’ body (about 14-point) equipped with special characters for printing northern languages like Swedish, which was the name that was given to the type at Oxford. Like all hand-cast types, these lack the precise finish of the machine-cast product, and their sides show scoring from being rubbed on a stone to remove the fins of metal that had crept round the edge of the hand-held mould. There is a conspicuous casting flaw in one sort, but if the face was good enough to print such a flaw in the body was of no consequence to the printer. It was said that the metal of hand-cast type was more solid than the machine-made product.

Here, for comparison, is some type that is only slightly later: an Etruscan type for the same body as the Swedish. It was made in London by William Caslon in about 1748 for sale to the Oxford University Press. The image below shows how it looks in the Caslon specimen of 1766. The type – almost the only type in existence from the original Caslon foundry – survived almost unused at Oxford because the opportunities for printing Etruscan were naturally so limited as to be virtually non-existent.

There is one other feature of cast type that the bibliographer sees and accepts without question, but which has caused more of a technical challenge to the founder (and irritation to the printer) than many readers can ever have suspected. Lower-case f has generally overhung the letter that follows: it is ‘kerned’ (to use the term in its original sense, one that has become modified in digital type-making). This was because f overhung the letter that followed in many early scripts, and typefounders, from Gutenberg onwards, have generally accepted the challenge.

In the 42-line Bible, a detail from which is shown below, as in most later types, f is kerned and hangs over the letter that follows. (In this example, it is also worth noting that there is a c that is cast to project beyond its body but in which the projection has been rubbed down flush to it, so that it abuts firmly on the specially-adapted form of i that follows, making a kind of ligature and keeping the rhythm of vertical strokes that contributes to the even visual texture of this type on the page.)

If the character following f was an i or an l, a special fi or fl sort needed to be made in order to avoid a collision; in several later types such collisions can be seen.

Here is one: the book, set in a nice bâtarde gothic, is Robert Gaguin, La mer de croniques et miroir historial de France, Paris, Nicole de la Barre c. 1520 (St Bride 5750). An f in the first line, in filz, has ridden up over the i next to it. Some five lines lower, a double-f ligature in suffisant has collided with the following i (or some other ascender) and sustained visible damage.

The kerned f became the common and inescapable feature of nearly all types, roman or gothic. (Perhaps to avoid the need for an fi character, Jenson put the dot of his i as far to the right of its body as it would go.) To give some idea of the engineering skills that were required to make the cantilevered projection of the f, here is the Canon or 36-point size of the so-called Fell type from Oxford:

Although precisely-engineered machines like the Monotype cast a kern that took some support from the shoulder of the following letter, founders generally shaved the underside of the kern in case variations in the height of the next letter induced stresses that could break the metal. In his Practical typecasting (1993), Theo Rehak, drawing on experience at ATF, specifies the use of the ‘kerning plow’, and also the use of a worn file for a substantial kern. Fig. 23 of Legros & Grant, Typographical printing-surfaces (1916) shows a ‘kerning file’, a device that held the individual type for kerning at the correct angle. One of these, from the foundry of Stevens, Shanks, was transferred to the St Bride Library.

In casting italics, the strokes of most of the descending letters like p needed to be kerned on the left and ascenders like l on the right, in order to get a good even rhythm. Italic f (together with long s) was a particular nuisance since it needed to be kerned on both sides: both kerned parts often tended to break or bend in use, however competent the caster had been. Eventually – but it took a long time – the habit of kerning f began to be lost. In the first decade of the 19th century Lord Stanhope, with his rational approach to everything and his enthusiasm for stereotyping saw no reason for keeping it (the plaster mould tended to catch in the kerned part of the letter). By the middle of the 19th century, when the long s had long been dropped from use, special ‘news founts’ with unkerned f were made for the printers of newspapers, who printed from stereotype plates.

Graham Pollard, a bibliographer who thought he had made a coup and identified a forgery by making much of its use of a kernless f apparently before its time, might have got himself into trouble if his antagonist, Thomas J. Wise (who was certainly guilty), had not been too old and tired to defend himself. Pollard had failed to look in specimens of the 1850s for kernless ‘news founts’.

As this image shows, the elimination of the kern from f did nothing to discourage the use of the fi and fl ligatured forms.

By the end of the 19th century, the practice of using non-kerning f for type for text setting was so widely accepted that for the makers of the Linotype machine, in which kerning was technically impossible, the limitation did not appear to be a significant handicap. Early designs made for the Monotype machine, which cast separate types, did not kern the f, perhaps principally to save trouble, since it was in fact possible. Eventually it was found by Monotype that kerned characters made italics that were better-spaced. Moreover this feature gave a conspicuous advantage over Linotype when traditional designs were made. And so the practice of kerning was reprieved, although in the last days of independent typefoundries the process was often handled with ever-decreasing understanding and skill. The italic of Monotype’s so-called Garamond type (series 156) handled the kerned characters very well: the long s is kerned even more generously than the f, demonstrating engineering skills that were no doubt those of the works manager F. H. Pierpont. The swash capitals are based on some made by Granjon for his Parangon italic, a type found in much printing in Paris and shown on the Berner specimen sheet of 1592. This is a specimen of Monotype’s 14-point Garamond italic. In this special version of the type, with its many archaic swash capitals and ligatured sorts, it seems likely that the long s was combined with some of the vowels that followed to make a single piece of type. Morison showed a synopsis of these characters on page 30 of his monograph On type faces, London, 1923.

But the machine could produce some impressive examples of kerning. The tail of the capital Q of Monotype Van Dijck (example below) runs right over the following letter.

For Linotype, for a long time the dominant system for typesetting in the United States, only a technical change would eventually overcome the limitations. In due course the liberating but flawed technology of filmsetting, and then its digital successors, notably OpenType, would do something to save the kerned f and to preserve the mandatory accompanying set of the five ff, fi, fl, ffi and ffl ligatures for painstaking and pedantic typographers.

French type and its nicks: a footnote

I wrote above that French type ‘usually’ has the nick on top. In fact I know of one exception to that rule, for a special reason.

The so-called Garamond type of the Imprimerie nationale has had much documenting in this blog (and of course in the magisterial Garamont website of the Ministry of Culture in France, introduced in October 2011). One odd result of the preserving of the matrices of Jean Jannon, acquired in 1641, is that as one can see that they have an unusual appearance : they are struck ‘upside down’. That is, the top of the letter is at the lower end of the matrix.

Traditionally the top of the letter in the matrix is at the end that is placed first in the mould. Making contact with the heurtoir, the ‘stool’ inside the mould, it sets the alignment of the type. The usual orientation of the letter on the matrix can be seen seen in this Figgins type of about 1810. The notch at the lower end is there to make it easier to tie a piece of leather to it so that it can be held in the mould, something that can be seen in the image of the mould by Simonneau:

The Jannon matrices were struck the other way round, so that the letter looks ‘upside down’. Perhaps it shows how new he was to typefounding. (As John Lane has noted, matrices for a very few English types of the 17th century were also struck in this manner, which perhaps tells us how isolated some English founders were from conventional practice.) Here is a matrix for Jannon’s Gros Canon (36-point) roman:

There is one result from Jannon’s habit that is perfectly logical but which surprised me at first. If type is cast from this matrix in a normal French mould the type itself will be ‘upside down’ on its body, so its nick will be ‘below’ the letter, as any English compositor would expect. This can be seen in examples of the 36-point Jannon type that have been cast at Ivry. I’m not sure that there is any moral to this anecdote, except that I find it reassuring that a kind of logical explanation can be found for such a minute variation from what seems like a rigidly undeviating and disciplined practice.

Note on nicks, etc.

Anyone at all interested in the discussion of this detail of the mould should look at Carter’s notes on its construction in ‘The history of the typefounder’s hand-mould’ in the Davis and Carter edition of Moxon, Mechanick exercises, revised edition, 1962, pp. 377–9. Kerning is dealt with pretty thoroughly by Fournier (Manuel typographique pp. 98 ff.; Carter, Fournier on typefounding, pp. 109 ff.).

An oversight. I am grateful to Stan Nelson for drawing my attention to the following passage, which I should have quoted in this post:

‘T. B. Reed noted (Old English Letter Foundries, 1887, p. 204) that the matrices for the Union Pearl, the Alexandrian Greek, the Court Hand, and the Scriptorials were struck with the letters upside-down. The same is true of Nicholls’s Great Primer Roman and Italic and the Great Primer Ethiopic at Oxford. If fitted in English moulds, therefore, they produce type with the nick at the back, which is normal in France. A possible explanation is that they were made for use with French moulds so as to cast type with the nick in front. Moulds of the kind appear, therefore, to have descended from Nicholls to Grover.’

Edward Rowe Mores, A dissertation upon English typographical founders edited by Harry Carter and Christopher Ricks,(London, 1961), p. 112. Horace Hart had already made some remarks on the orientation of the Nicholls matrices in his Notes on a century of typography at the University Press, Oxford (1900), at page 139.

Notes on some sources of images

I am grateful to those who have granted access to the materials shown here.

The image of the mould engraved by Louis Simonneau in 1694 is one of a series of plates illustrating typefounding that were prepared but never published, and copies are almost unfindable outside Paris. (But it is known that some proofs escaped. Copies of these may possibly exist in libraries or print collections, perhaps, since they have no captions, mistakenly identified as plates made for the Encyclopédie.) I showed these images with a commentary for the first time in an article, ‘Illustrations of typefounding engraved for the Description des Arts et Métiers of the Académie Royale des Sciences, 1694 to c. 1700’, Matrix 11 (1991), pp. 60–80. They match the manuscript description of punchcutting and typefounding compiled by Jacques Jaugeon for the Description des Arts et Métiers in the Bibliothèque de l'Institut de France, Paris. Fred Smeijers later showed them in his book Counterpunch (1996). The originals were from an album at the St Bride Library, London. The printed image of the mould is missing from this set of plates but the original copper plate had been acquired by the Newberry Library, Chicago, which was kind enough to have a few new impressions made from it, from one of which this detail is taken.

The two details of sketches showing a printing type for capital A appear on leaf 80 of an album relating to the Description des Arts et Métiers (Gr. fol. 114) at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris.

The early types from the University Press, Oxford, are among materials that were transferred to the St Bride Library in 1989.

The matrix of the Gros Canon roman of Jean Jannon is in the Cabinet des Poinçons of the Atelier du livre d’art et de l’estampe of the Imprimerie nationale, Ivry-sur-Seine.

The detail of the word faciem from the 42-line Bible (Leviticus 20:3) is from a single leaf at the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, one of several from a broken copy that were sold in New York in 1921 with a common title-page reading A noble fragment, being a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible.

There are selected articles from the Encyclopédie in Giles Barber’s Bookmaking in Diderot’s Encyclopédie: a facsimile reproduction of articles and plates, with an introduction (Farnborough: Gregg, 1973)

Elzevir letter

From time to time those who handle English books of the early 18th century come across the phrase ‘Elzevir letter’ in the lists of new publications that are added at the end by booksellers. It refers to publications that are set in types that are small but elegant, and (it is implied) they are also beautifully printed, like the little books of the Elzevirs or Elseviers, printers in Leyden and elsewhere in the Low Countries during the 17th century. These were often editions of the Latin classics in tiny formats. Later they became the quarry, sometimes sought rather obsessively, of collectors, and several lists of the titles were printed, of which more below. The reputation of the ‘Elzevir letter’ in England was certainly enhanced by the sight of the crisp, competent presswork of the Dutch printers.

Thanks to Google, it is not difficult to put together a pattern of the use of this term in the English book trade. It begins quite late, some time after the period of the greatest commercial activity of the Elsevier family in the Netherlands. There are several examples in announcements of books in England from about 1712 to 1715, some of them from Curll and Lintott, and there is occasional use of the term during the later 18th century. According to its publicity, the London Magazine, or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer, launched in January 1760, was to be ‘beautifully printed on a new Elzevir letter, and fine paper’. The earliest example that I have found is in an announcement in the London Gazette in 1712:

For ‘Elzevir letter’, the OED has: ‘Used [attributively], an edition published by one of the Elzeviers; formerly applied also to editions printed in the small neat form and with the kind of type adopted by them.’ And then, ‘The style of type used by the Elzeviers in their small editions of the classics. Now used as the name of a special form of printing types.’

The term ‘Elzevir letter’, as used by the English booksellers, however ill-informed its terms of reference, was evidently intended as praise. But what are we to make of this succession of phrases from D. B. Updike’s Printing Types (1922): ‘The Elzevirs are popularly remembered nowadays by their little editions in 32mo, with engraved title-pages, narrow margins, and compact pages of a solid, monotonous type which is Dutch and looks so.’ (ii. 15). Later he writes of ‘compact monotonous type’ (ii. 17), and then: ‘To have seen one Elzevir volume … in this format, is to have seen all—or certainly as many as one wishes to see! How anyone ever read with comfort pages so solidly set in such monotonous old style type passes understanding—or at least mine.’ (ii. 17). We begin to get the point that Updike is making: Dutch types are dull and boring, perhaps (though he does not quite dare to say it) like Dutch people.

Commenting on the type specimen sheet of types ‘cut by the late Christoffel van Dijck, issued by the widow of Daniel Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1681’ (a sheet repoduced in Type Specimen Facsimiles, 1963, no. 12, and quite often elsewhere too), Updike wrote, ‘Most of these types are recognisable as Dutch by their sturdy qualities of workmanship, and, particularly in the smaller sizes of roman and italic, by a tiresome evenness of design.’ (ii. 20).

Monotonous? Tiresome? Is this an example of Bostonian impatience with the lingering Dutch heritage of New Amsterdam? Possibly. But a longer and more involved story appears to lurk behind this display of bad temper. In 1880 a writer in Belgium published a study of the Elzevirs and their books, a major contribution to the listing of the books made by this family. Les Elzevier, by Alphonse Willems, offered a solution to the problem of the origin of the types, which was one that had exercised several bibliographers. (This is my rendering of his French text.)

“All the writers who have investigated and appreciated the masterpieces that came from the presses of the Elzevirs have had repeatedly to ask the name of the artist who devised and engraved the types, with their delicacy of design, their happy proportions, and their accomplished fitting, which their editions so prized that they are quite incomparable. Whoever created the type that was so elegant and perfect of its kind, so that the term ‘elzevirian’ that is normally applied to it has become a synomym for perfection, was no ordinary artist, and deserves to have his name known to posterity, no less than that of the Elzevirs themselves. This question of attribution was raised long ago, and – lacking solid proof as we do – it has been resolved by more or less ingenious guesswork. As ever, the first guess was in the direction of the best-known punchcutters, Claude Garamond or the Sanlecques. A. Didot was the supporter of the first of these names, and Adry, relying on an early document, preferred the others. Garamond, whose work of this kind, especially the fine greek types he made to the order of François I, entitled him, in the words of Vitré, to be named among the great artists, and was worthy of being associated with the Elzevirs. There was only one problem. Garamond died in December 1561, nearly three-quarters of a century before the Elzevirs began to issue their first masterpieces, and the specimens of his style that we know are very different from that of the Elzevir types. In fact, the types of the Sanlecques have similarities that cannot be mistaken. Moreover, the Sanlecques were contemporaries of the Elzevirs, and – a detail that has its importance – the younger brother Sanlecque became a protestant, and thus professed the same religion as the famous Dutch printers.”

Willems then delivers what may be called his punch line: “There is no need to guess any longer. The maker of these marvellous punches was neither Garamond nor the Sanlecques, nor any other foreign master: he was a Dutch punchcutter, and his name was Christoffel van Dijck.”

At Antwerp, in the collection of the newly created Museum Plantin-Moretus, Willems had found the broadside specimen of 1681 bearing the name of Daniel Elsevier, showing the types of Christoffel van Dijck, and he included a photo-lithographic facsimile of the sheet in his book. Here was an Elsevier (the widow of Daniel in this case) offering for sale the foundry of van Dijck. So far as Willems was concerned, it solved the problem of the origin of the Elsevier types, demolishing the claims that had been made on behalf of French punchcutters. But did it do so?

In 1756, in the Journal des Sçavans for May, Jean-Pierre Fournier, Fournier l’aîné, the owner of the Le Bé foundry in Paris, had asserted, ‘I own the foundry of Garamond, the Le Bé family and Granjon. I shall be happy to display my punches and matrices. These are the types that made the reputations of the Estiennes, Plantin and the Elzevirs.’

In 1784, in his Épître sur les progrès de l’imprimerie, Pierre Didot included the line, “Garamond d’Elzévir a cimenté la gloire” – that is, ‘Garamond conferred lasting fame on the Elzevirs’. (The ‘A. Didot’ cited by Willems in the passage above must be ‘F.-A.’ Didot, François-Ambroise, the father of Pierre.)

So far as I can discover, both claims had some justification.

Fournier l’aîné does not appear to have produced a formal specimen of the types of his foundry, which given the extent of its materials and their age would not have been a simple task. But in the Collection Anisson of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS. fr. 22189, there are several scattered leaves with showings of types that are attributed to him. No. 65 is a small roman type. It is annotated by hand, ‘Petit Texte by Garamond, used by the Elzevirs’. ‘Petit Texte’ was a small size, roughly equivalent to eight points.

The ‘early document’ referred to by Adry and cited by Willems was the Epreuves des caractères du fond des Sanlecques (Paris, 1757). This specimen does indeed include a ‘Petit Texte’ that appears to match the type shown on the leaf of Fournier l’aîné. Moreover, the introductory note says that the types shown have been used in the much-appreciated books of Cramoisy, Vitré ... the Elzevirs and others.

There is a fundamental point to make here. As we have seen, Willems used the age of the materials of Garamont (d. 1561) as an objection to the possibility of their use by the Elzevirs. But we are now aware that punches could be used to make many different sets of matrices, and that, used for casting by hand, these would go on producing good types for some hundreds of years. In Paris alone, the Garamont Petit Texte was represented by matrices in the stock of the Le Bé foundry, in that of Lamesle, and also of the Sanlecques.

So what type did the Elzevirs use? Using the example that I have closest to hand, the little Ovid of 1629, I find that its text is set in the Petit Texte roman of Garamont, a type with a body of 2.9 mm (Hendrik Vervliet, French Renaissance printing types: a conspectus, 2010, type 20). Whether it was supplied by the Sanlecques or the foundry of Le Bé is of no consequence.

Where an italic was called for in the little Ovid, the type used was a Brevier italic by Robert Granjon.

There was much that was trivial, even rather hysterical, in the assertions that were made by both Willems and Updike. Willems, writing in French, displayed open Flemish loyalties and was delighted to diminish the claims that had been made on behalf of French types and to promote appreciation of the skills of a Dutch punchcutter. Updike was unwilling to express appreciation of anything Dutch. Neither of them attempted to name the types that had been used to set the text of any specific book. Updike was all too willing to believe, with Willems, that the Elzevir types were Dutch, and in his view they must therefore share certain inevitable characteristics.

(Updike’s classic blunder in the same work, Printing Types, apparently driven by prejudice, relates to the text of the edition of the first volume of the Works of Selden, printed in London by William Bowyer in 1726, which had been identified mistakenly during the 18th century by John Nichols as an early use of type cut by William Caslon. Updike comments, ‘To the student who has been looking at earlier English books printed with Dutch fonts, the pages of the Selden are a relief to the eye – they are so easy to read, so clear and beautiful.’ As A. F. Johnson was later able to show, the types of the Selden were Dutch, not English.)

I have given just one example of the use in 1629 of the Petit Texte of Garamont. It is entirely likely that other books of the Elseviers, especially later ones, made use of types from founders in Amsterdam or elsewhere in the Low Countries. But supporters of the idea should supply exact details: the title of the book, the name of the type body and the founder, based on printed evidence of some kind, preferably a reliably dated type specimen. Specimens of the foundries of Christoffel Van Dijck and Voskens, with attributions of the types, have long been available in facsimile (Type Specimen Facsimiles, ed. John Dreyfus. 1963), and more recent scholarship has added greatly to our knowledge of typefounding in the Low Countries. Some patient, exact work on the identification of the types used in individual books of the Elseviers would be a welcome contribution to the discussion.

Sources

Jean Félicissime Adry, Notice sur les imprimeurs de la famille des Elzévirs … par un ancien bibliothécaire (Paris: Delance, 1806).

Simon Bérard, Essai bibliographique sur les éditions des Elzévirs (Paris: De l’imprimerie de Firmin Didot, 1822). Uses Adry’s study as a basis.

Charles Pieters, Annales de l’imprimerie des Elsevier (Gand, 1858).

Alphonse Willems, Les Elzevier, histoire et annales typographiques (Bruxelles, 1880).

My thanks to Stephen Lubell for an image.

Talbot Baines Reed, typefounder and sailor

Talbot Baines Reed was born in 1852 and he died in 1893, a premature death for someone who might in later years have been able to contribute even more than he did to our knowledge of the history of his trade, which was that of typefounder.

This is in some ways a personal essay. I have known Reed’s handwriting intimately for all my working life, mostly from the well-informed notes on the types in them that he wrote in the books that he accumulated. Some of them were battered copies that he must have got cheaply in bookshops or perhaps from bookstalls like those in Farringdon Road near the railway station. His handwriting (of which a sample is seen above) was lively and neat, and I recognize it with pleasure wherever I meet it.

These books make up a substantial part of his typographical collection that was given to the St Bride Library in 1900 (the gift was that of J. Passmore Edwards, who had bought it from the family), where this personal element in their choice makes them a happy complement to the more systematically made library of William Blades, who seems to have got much of his material from dealers in England and abroad who had instructions – which they carried out very well – to search for and to supply the literature of the printing trades.

Here is Reed’s note in an item that he bought at an auction sale of 1886 at which he and Blades both got more books more cheaply than they had dared to hope.

Technical note for users of the library’s online catalogue. Each of its books has a unique ‘accession number’ which serves as its identity, with the letters SB in front of it in the full catalogue entry. The accession numbers for Blades’s books were all given a prefix of 20, so that they often have five figures, beginning with 2. The numbers for Reed’s books are more often of four figures. Here is a nice example, a folio volume findable under the name of its printer, Johann Froben, with some types of which the cutting is now attributed to Peter Schoeffer, the son of Gutenberg’s assistant. Erasmus, In Novum Testamentum annotationes. Basel, 1519. Its number is SB5867.

In 1869, after he left the City of London School, Reed began to work at his father’s typefoundry, Sir Charles Reed & Sons, known as ‘the Fann Street Foundry’, and after his father’s death in 1881 he became its director. In 1877 he became associated with Blades in setting up the display that was shown at the Caxton Celebration, an event to mark the five-hundredth anniversary of Caxton’s printing in England that was held at the South Kensington Museum. A year later, with Blades’s encouragement and support, he began to write his History of the Old English Letter Foundries, an account of the British foundries based on extensive reading of printed and archival material that was published in 1887.

It is not easy to say how far Reed was involved in the practical side of the foundry, but there is a surviving document, of which the title page is shown above, that gives us a fascinating hint: the handwritten ‘Catalogue of Hand Moulds’ of the Fann Street Foundry dated 1883 which is among materials that came to the Type Museum, London, with documents from Stephenson, Blake. (Justin Howes listed them and scanned this item.) It was made at a date when we know from other sources that the use of hand moulds was becoming less practical as a part of the operations of a modern typefoundry. Reed may have taken the opportunity to bring together and list this collection of items that were still in use but which were obsolescent and had some antiquarian value.

One item that was inherited by Stephenson, Blake is worth putting on record, the fruit no doubt of Reed’s historical researches. This was ‘safe Q’, which was not a safe at all, but a simple chest of drawers which was located in the ‘tomb’, the store room at Sheffield to which few visitors were admitted. It contained ‘Mr. Reed’s curio collection’, namely some items that in looking through the materials of the Fann Street Foundry he had identified as being of special historical interest: the matrices of some of the undoubtedly old black-letters, those of ‘scriptorial’ types like those of Ichabod Dawks and the so-called ‘Union Pearl’, and the matrices for the capitals of Joseph Moxon’s Canon roman, discarded by Caslon. Later visitors had reason to be grateful to him.

In 1890 Reed gave a talk on ‘Old and new fashions in typography’ at the Royal Society of Arts in which he drew on his historical researches, but most of his ceaseless regular writing, which he greatly enjoyed, consisted of the school stories that were published serially in the Boys’ Own Paper, set in public boarding schools with names like ‘Fellsgarth’ and ‘St Dominic’s’, exotic environments that for the day boy who had attended the City of London School must have provided an exercise in creative imagination.

There were two other connections that might have developed further, given time. The Reed foundry was chosen to cast the types cut by Edward Prince for William Morris, who gave his founder an album of the enlarged photographs of early types made by Emery Walker on which his own designs had been based. (One of them appears above.) And Reed was the first honorary secretary, ‘until you find someone better’, of the Bibliographical Society. He signed with the others present at the inaugural meeting on 15 July 1892.

The History of the Old English Letter Foundries, which got its title from a phrase in the idiosyncratic essay of 1778 by the 18th-century antiquarian Edward Rowe Mores, A dissertation upon English typographical founders and founderies, is worth a word here. It is a triumph of rapid and scrupulously exact writing. Modern readers know it from the revised edition that was published by Faber & Faber in 1952. Although the name on the title page was that of the historian A. F. Johnson, the initiative for the new edition, as for so many things of its kind, was that of Stanley Morison, and the new edition of Reed’s work, like so many of the projects that were generated during Morison’s decade or so of headlong activity beginning in the 1920s (the big book on the Fell types is another example), would never have been realised without the patient support of others.

Johnson’s edition, a handsome volume printed at the University Press at Oxford at the height of its capabilities, set in Monotype Bell and bound in green buckram, is (notwithstanding its many virtues) something of an editorial disaster. Huge changes in typographical scholarship had taken place during the sixty years that had elapsed since the work had appeared, but in the larger part of Johnson’s text it is impossible to be sure whether any phrase was written by Reed in 1887 or Johnson in 1952, and the question is often an important one. There are one or two sensible examples of major surgery: the account of William Caslon and his earlier types is wholly imported from one of Johnson’s own published studies in which he established, for example, that the traditional account of the first use of one of Caslon’s own types, in Bowyer’s Selden of 1726 (which had misled Updike and lured him into a characteristic anti-Dutch rant), was nonsense. Conversely, however, Reed’s first chapter, which gives a lucid summary of theories concerning the early making of printing type, is given almost wholly in his own words with the minimum of interference, but without some effort one cannot be quite sure of this: Johnson had a habit of tinkering with his text. One example of inadequate editing among rather too many is his treatment of a reference by Reed to ‘our copy of Cottrell’s specimen’ (Reed 1887, p. 292). In his text of 1952 Johnson altered this to ‘the St Bride copy of Cottrell’s specimen’ (Reed-Johnson, p. 292), presumably on the grounds that Reed’s own books had come to St Bride’s. But he might have checked that this was so: Reed’s reference was in fact to the Fann Street Foundry’s ‘house’ copy of the specimen, which remained with the foundry and was transferred with it to Stephenson, Blake in Sheffield when they acquired the Reed materials. It should now be with the specimens that were acquired by the Type Museum. (I write ‘should be’ because the earlier of the specimens acquired from Stephenson, Blake cannot currently be located there.)

However, it should be said that Johnson added a great deal of invaluable material to his edition, extending the period that is covered to the later 19th century, and his book is indispensable to any reader concerned with British typefounding. But then so too is Reed’s original work. As I say, Johnson was capable of changing any phrase at his whim, and as the above example shows it is impossible to be quite sure of the status of the modern text without having both editions open side by side. A reader should not be compelled to work under such tiresome conditions.

The printer’s copy for the text of 1952, which survives at the St Bride Library, is a nice reminder of the trials that were then imposed on its compositors by the scholarly printer: it is simply a torn up copy of Reed’s book corrected in handwriting by both Morison and Johnson.

Morison had intended to take a more active part in the making of the new edition than he was able to give to it. The bibliography at the end of his article ‘Printing types’ that appears in the 14th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica includes this title: Reed, A history of the old English letter foundries. new ed. A. F. Johnson and Stanley Morison, 2 vols. 1929. This is the bibliographical ghost of a book that never existed: Johnson would eventually realise the edition that Morison had planned. But (with some encouragement and the lavish editorial help that The Times provided him with on behalf of its official history) Morison did produce the memoir of Reed that he had intended to add to it: Talbot Baines Reed: author, bibliographer, typefounder was printed and distributed in 1960 by Brooke Crutchley, the University Printer at Cambridge. Other sources for Reed’s life include the memoir by his friend John Sime that was added to his last book Kilgorman (1895), and the revised entry in ODNB.

As well as the connection with St Bride’s I have another link with Talbot Baines Reed. A Reed family memorial, on which he is commemorated, is in Abney Park cemetery, not far from my front door. It is a large and striking Celtic cross, the work of the O’Shea brothers, the family practice of stonemasons and sculptors from Ballyhooly in County Cork who had collaborated with Ruskin on the sculptural work of the Oxford Museum of Natural History. This is how the inscription for T. B. Reed, which is now obscured and unreadable, looked in 1990.

In 1876 Reed had married Elizabeth Jane, daughter of Samuel MacCurdy Greer, a County Court judge who had briefly been MP for Londonderry County. He enjoyed swimming and sailing, and the family holidays had long taken place in the northern Irish counties, which he loved. At 17 he saved the lives of his younger brother and a cousin who had got into trouble while they were swimming.

Reed’s last published work, issued in 1895 after his death, was Kilgorman: a story of Ireland in 1798. Near the opening is a scene in which the narrator, a lonely child with mysterious ancestry, spots a French gun-runner skilfully navigating the perils of the lee-shore by Fanad Head at the opening to Lough Swilly, on a coast that he knew very well. It is a piece of vivid, virtuoso writing with which I shall conclude this piece, leaving readers of Patrick O’Brian with the suggestion that this passage must surely (along with Conan Doyle’s Rodney Stone, and countless other scattered sources) have been among the texts that were known to him and that were drawn on in his published works:

I tried to get up on my feet, but the wind buffeted me back before I reached my knees, and I was fain to lie prone, with my nose to the storm, blinking through half-closed eyes out to sea.
For a long time I lay thus. Then I seemed to descry at the point of the bay windward a sail. It was a minute or more before I could be certain I saw aright. Yes, it was a sail.
What craft could be mad enough in such weather to trust itself to the mercies of the bay? Even my father, the most daring of helmsmen, would give Fanad Head a wide berth before he put such a wind as this at his back. This stranger must be either disabled or ignorant of the coast, or she would never drive in thus towards a lee-shore like ours. Boy as I was, I knew better seamanship than that.
Yet as I watched her, she seemed to me neither cripple nor fool. She was a cutter-rigged craft, long and low in the water, under close canvas, and to my thinking wonderfully light and handy in the heavy sea. She did not belong to these parts—even I could tell that—and her colours, if she had any, had gone with the wind.
The question was, would she on her present tack weather Fanad Head (on which I lay) and win the lough? And if not, how could she escape the rocks on which every moment she was closing?
At first it seemed that nothing could save her, for she broke off short of the point, and drove in within half-a-mile of the rocks. Then, while I waited to see the end of her, she suddenly wore round, and after staggering a moment while the sea broke over her, hauled up to the wind, and careening over, with her mainsail sweeping the water, started gaily on the contrary tack.
It was so unlike anything any of our clumsy trawler boats were capable of, that I was lost in admiration at the suddenness and daring of the manoeuvre. But Fanad was still to be weathered, and close as she sailed to the wind, it seemed hardly possible to gain sea-room to clear it.
Yet she cleared it, even though the black rocks frowned at her not a cable’s length from her lee-quarter, and the wind laid her over so that her mast-head seemed almost to touch them as it passed. Then, once clear, up went her helm as she turned again into the wind, and slipped, with the point on her weather-quarter, into the safe waters of the lough.
I was so delighted watching this adventure from my lonely perch that I did not notice the October afternoon was nearly spent, and that the light was beginning to fade. The storm gathered force every moment, so that when at last I turned to go home I had to crawl a yard or two to shelter before I could stand on my feet.


Lough Swilly (Wikipedia)