Garamond

For other uses, see Garamond (disambiguation).

Garamond

Category	Serif
Classification	Old-style
Designer(s)	Claude Garamond Jean Jannon
Shown here	Adobe Garamond Pro (regular style based on Garamond's work; italic on the work of Robert Granjon)

Garamond is a group of many old-style serif typefaces, originally those designed by Parisian craftsman Claude Garamond and other 16th century French engravers, and now many modern revivals. Though his name was written as 'Garamont' in his lifetime, the typefaces are generally spelled 'Garamond'.

Garamond worked as an engraver of punches, the masters used to stamp matrices, the moulds used to cast metal type. He worked in the tradition of what is now called old-style serif letter design, that produced letters with a relatively organic structure resembling handwriting with a pen but with a slightly more structured and upright design. Although Garamond himself remains considered an eminent figure in French printing of the sixteenth century, historical research over the last century has increasingly placed him in context as one artisan among several active at a time of rapid production of new typefaces in sixteenth-century France, operating within a pre-existing tradition defined by the work of printers of the preceding half-century, in particular Aldus Manutius and his punchcutter Francesco Griffo. Therefore, the term "Garamond" in modern use may be understood to mean typefaces based on the appearance of early modern French printing, not necessarily specifically Garamond's work.

Some distinctive characteristics in Garamond's letters are the small eye of the 'e' and the bowl of the a, which has a sharp hook upwards at top left. The 'M' is slightly splayed. The x-height (height of lower-case letters) is low, especially at larger sizes, making the capitals large relative to the lower case, while the top serifs on the ascenders of letters like 'd' have a downward slope and rise subtly above the cap height. Garamond typefaces are popular and often used, particularly for printing body text and books.

Since around 1910, many modern revivals of Garamond and related typefaces have been developed. Among these, the roman (regular; upright) versions of Adobe Garamond, Granjon, Sabon, and Stempel Garamond are directly based on Garamond's work. It is common to pair these with italics based on those created by his contemporary Robert Granjon, who was well known for his proficiency in this genre. However, many 'Garamond' revivals are actually based on the work of a later punch-cutter, Jean Jannon, whose work was for some years misattributed to Garamond.

Modern Garamond revivals also often add a matching bold and 'lining' numbers at the height of capital letters, neither of which were used in Garamond's time. The most common digital release of Garamond is Monotype Garamond. Bundled with many Microsoft products, it is a revival of Jannon's work.

History

Garamond's life and career

File:Petite Texte from Épreuves générales des caracteres.png

'Petit texte' type intended for body text, created by Garamond.

File:De Aetna 1495.jpg

A page spread from the book De Aetna, printed by Aldus Manutius in 1495. It would become influential in French printing from the 1530s.

Garamond designed type in the 'roman', or upright style, in italic, and Greek. In the period of Garamond's early life roman type had been displacing the blackletter or Gothic type which was used in much (although not all) early French printing.

The roman designs of Garamond which are his most imitated were based on a typeface cut in 1495–1496 for the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius by Francesco Griffo. This was first used in the book De Aetna, a short work by poet and cleric Pietro Bembo which was Manutius' first printing in the Latin alphabet after a long series of publications of classics of Greek literature that had won him an international reputation. Historian Beatrice Warde has assessed De Aetna as something of a pilot project, a small book printed to an even higher standard than Manutius' norm.

File:Cicero edition published by Robert Estienne 1537.jpg

An edition of Cicero, published by Robert Estienne 1537. His graceful and delicate typefaces, based on the work of Aldus Manutius thirty-five years earlier, redefined practices in French printing; never before had a complete roman typeface been made to such a large size. His typefaces were either cut by or defined the style in which Claude Garamond worked.

French typefounders of the 16th century assiduously examined Manutius's work (and, it is thought, De Aetna in particular) as a source of inspiration. De Aetna was printed using a mixture of alternate characters, perhaps as an experiment, and several of these are all found in Robert Estienne's printing of the 1530s; typefaces created by Antoine Augereau (who may have been Garamond's mentor) only use those letters preferred in Manutius' later printing, indicate that other Manutius books were examined as a source of inspiration separately. This examination extended to in some cases copying his first 'M' shown in De Aetna which had no serif pointing out of the letter at top right, a design considered very eccentric. (It has been suggested to be the result of defective casting, especially since Manutius' later fonts do not show it.)

The period from 1520 to around 1560, encompassing Garamond's career, was an extremely busy period for typeface creation. Many fonts were created, some apparently for exclusive use by a specific printer, others sold or traded between them. Many engravers were active over this time, including Garamond himself, Granjon, Guillaume Le Bé, Antoine Augereau, Simon de Colines (or someone commissioned by him), Pierre Hautin and others, creating typefaces not just in the Latin alphabet, but also in Greek and Hebrew for scholarly use. This period saw the creation of a pool of high-quality punches and matrices that would supply the French printing industry, to a large extent, for the next two centuries.

Garamond was born perhaps around 1510, but very little is known about his life or work before 1540. He worked for a variety of employers on commission, creating punches for publishers and the government. Garamond's typefaces were popular abroad, and replaced Griffo's original roman type at the Aldine Press in Venice. He also worked as a publisher and bookseller. While his italics have been considered less impressive than his roman typefaces, he was one of the early printers to establish the modern tradition that the italic capitals should slope as the lower case does, rather than remain upright as Roman square capitals do. How many italics Garamond cut himself is unknown. Professor Hendrik Vervliet, the leading contemporary authority on sixteenth-century French printing, concludes that only one italic font (of 1545) can be attributed to him with certainty, although three more are likely to be his.

Estienne's 1550 edition of the New Testament was typeset with Garamond's grecs du roi. Few modern Garamond releases have attempted to replicate this fluid style that attempts to approach handwriting.

File:Grecs du Roi punches 1.jpg

Garamond's original punches for the Grecs du roi type, owned by the French government.

Garamond designed type for the Greek alphabet from early in his career, but these, the Grecs du roi fonts, commissioned for the government in 1540, are very different to his Latin designs: they attempt to simulate the elegant handwriting of Cretan scribe Angelo Vergecio and include a vast variety of alternate letters and ligatures to achieve this. This style is impractical for modern setting of body text, since it requires careful manual choice of characters for every word. Several 'Garamond' releases such as Adobe's contain Greek designs that are either a compromise between Garamond's upright Latin designs and his slanted Greek ones or primarily inspired by his Latin designs.

Garamond died in 1561 and his punches and matrices were sold off by his widow. Purchasers included the Le Bé type foundry in Paris run by the family of Guillaume Le Bé, Christophe Plantin of Antwerp, and the Frankfurt foundry often referred to by historians as Egenolff-Berner. The chaotic sales caused problems, and Le Bé's son wrote to Plantin's successor Moretus offering to trade matrices so they could both have complementary type in a range of sizes. Egelhoff-Berner brought out a specimen in 1592 of types by Garamond and others, which would later be a source for many Garamond revivals.

Plantin's collection of original Garamond punches and matrices survives at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, together with many other typefaces collected by Plantin from other typefounders of the period. The collection has been used extensively for research, for example by historians Harry Carter and Hendrik Vervliet. Carter's son Matthew would later describe his research as helping to demonstrate "that the finest collection of printing types made in typography's golden age was in perfect condition (some muddle aside) [along with] Plantin's accounts and inventories which names the cutters of his types." Plantin also commissioned Granjon to create alternate characters for three Garamond fonts with shortened ascenders and descenders to allow tighter linespacing.

While some records such as Plantin's exist of what exact types were cut by Garamond himself, many details of his career remain uncertain, with initial opinion of his date of birth as around 1480 being substituted by much later estimates more recently. A document called the Le Bé Memorandum (based on the memories of Guillaume Le Bé, but collated by one of his sons around 1643) suggests that Garamond finished his apprenticeship around 1510. This is considered unlikely by modern historians since his mother was still alive when he died in 1561 and little is known of him before around 1540.

It has been suggested that the first Roman types designed by Claude Garamond were a set created for Robert Estienne and first used by him around 1530-3, that were the first typefaces used in Paris to copy the Manutius model. However, Vervliet suggests that these 'Estienne typefaces' were not designed by Garamond and that his career began somewhat later. Vervliet suggests that the creator of this set of typefaces to a unified design may have been a 'Master Constantin', recorded in the Le Bé Memorandum as a master type designer of the period before Garamond but about whom nothing is otherwise known and to whom no obvious other body of work can be ascribed. If so, his disappearance from history (perhaps due to an early death, since all his presumed work appeared in just three years from 1530 to 1533) may have allowed Garamond's reputation to develop in the following decade. The Le Bé Memorandum does however attribute them to Garamond; Vervliet notes that attributions of the Estienne type to Garamond do begin quite early but suggests that this may be a mistake caused by his later reputation, and because the Estienne typefaces remained proprietary Le Bé might not have been knowledgeable about their source.

Jean Jannon

File:Jannon Romain de l'Université matrices.jpg

The matrices of Jannon's Imprimerie nationale type.

In 1621, sixty years after Garamond's death, the French printer Jean Jannon released a specimen of typefaces that had some characteristics similar to the Garamond designs. The French Royal Printing Office (Imprimerie Royale) appears to have bought matrices from him in 1641. (The contract is actually made for one 'Nicholas Jannon', which historians have concluded to be a simple mistake.) Despite the purchase, it is not clear that the office ever much used Jannon's type: historian James Mosley has reported being unable to find books printed by the Imprimerie that use more than a few specific sizes of italic, although "it is not easy to prove a negative". His type would later be misattributed to Garamond. Jannon wrote in his specimen that:

Seeing that for some time many persons have had to do with the art [of printing] who have greatly lowered it ... the desire came upon me to try if I might imitate, after some fashion, some one among those who honourably busied themselves with the art, [men whose deaths] I hear regretted every day [Jannon mentions some eminent printers of the previous century] ... and inasmuch as I could not accomplish this design for lack of types which I needed ... [some typefounders] would not, and others could not furnish me with what I lacked [so] I resolved, about six years ago, to turn my hand in good earnest to the making of punches, matrices and moulds for all sorts of characters, for the accommodation both of the public and of myself.

Jannon's career took place during a politically tense period. Jannon was a Protestant in mostly Catholic France, and began his career as printer for the Protestant Academy at Sedan in what is now north-eastern France before taking up punchcutting, in his thirties by his report. Sedan the time enjoyed an unstable independence as a principality at a time when the French government had conceded through the Edict of Nantes to allowing a complicated system of restricted liberties for Protestants. While acknowledging his talent and commissioning equipment from him, as documented by the surviving purchase order, it is known that authorities in 1644 raided an office in Caen where he had been commissioned to do printing. Warde initially assumed that this was the source of the Jannon materials in the Imprimerie Nationale before the government's purchase order from Jannon came to light. Jannon's types and their descendants are recognizable by the triangular serifs on the top left of such characters as 'm', 'n' and 'r', which have a very steep slant in Jannon's design compared to Garamond's. The italics are also very different to Garamond's own or Granjon's, being much more ornate.

By the nineteenth century, Jannon's matrices had come to be known as the Caractères de l'Université (Characters of the University). It has sometimes been claimed that this term was an official name designated for the Jannon type by Cardinal Richelieu, while Warde in 1926 more plausibly suggested it might be a garbled recollection of Jannon's work with the Sedan Academy, which operated much like a university despite not using the name. Carter in the 1970s followed this conclusion. Mosley, however, concludes that no report of the term (or much use of Jannon's type at all) exists before the nineteenth century, and it may originate from a generic term of the previous century simply meaning older or more conservative typeface designs, perhaps those preferred in academic publishing.

After Jannon

The Napoleonic Code, printed by the company of Firmin Didot in 1804. The Didot family's extremely influential type style, now called Didot, displaced the old-style serif type of Garamond, Jannon and others in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The old-style typefaces of Garamond and his contemporaries and successors remained in use in printing for over two hundred years after Garamond's death, and became influential on Dutch printing during the period known as Dutch golden age, when Dutch printing was itself very influential across Europe. Dutch printers and punchcutters, however, sometimes favoured more solid, darker designs than Garamond's.

Old-style serif typefaces by Garamond and his colleagues finally fell out of use with the arrival of what is now called the Didone style of printing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, promoted by the Didot family in France and others. This favoured a much more geometric, constructed style of letter which could show off the increasingly refined paper and printing technologies of the period. Mosley comments:

The upheavals of the Revolution coincided with the major shift in the style of printing types that is associated with the family of Didot, and the stock of old materials abruptly lost its value, except as scrap. Punches rust, and the copper of matrices is recyclable. All traces of the early types that had been in the hands of the trade typefounders like Le Bé, Sanlecque and Lamesle in Paris vanished completely. No relics of them were saved anywhere, except in commercial centres that had become relative backwaters, like Antwerp, where the Plantin-Moretus printing office piously preserved the collection of its founder ... the term caractères de l'Université became attached by default to the set of apparently early matrices that had survived, its provenance forgotten, in the mixed stock of materials of the national printing-office.

Garamond's reputation remained respected, even by members of the Didot family whose type designs came to dominate French printing.

Revival era

A revival of interest in 'old-style' serif typefaces took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This saw a revival of the Imprimerie royale typefaces (the office was now called the Imprimerie nationale following the end of the French monarchy), which, unlike Garamond's own work, had survived in Paris. The attribution came to be considered certain by the Imprimerie's director Arthur Christian.

Early revivals were often based directly on the Imprimerie nationale types, one of the first by Peignot and then by American Type Founders (ATF). These revivals could be made using pantograph machine engraving systems, which gave a cleaner result than historic typefaces whose master punches had been hand-carved out of steel, and allowed rapid development of a large range of sizes. In addition, the new hot metal typesetting technology of the period created increasing availability and demand for new fonts. Among hot metal typesetting companies, Monotype's branches in Britain and the United States brought out separate versions, and the American branch of Linotype licensed that of ATF.

A number of historians began in the early twentieth century to question if the Imprimerie nationale Latin-alphabet type was really the work Garamond as the Grecs du Roi undoubtedly were. Doubt was raised by French historian Jean Paillard, but he died in the First World War soon after publishing his conclusions in 1914 and his work remained little-read. ATF's historian Henry Lewis Bullen secretly doubted that the 'Garamond' his company was reviving was really Garamond's work, noting that he had never seen it in a sixteenth-century book. He discussed his concerns with ATF junior librarian Beatrice Warde, who would later move to Europe and become a prominent writer on printing advising the British branch of Monotype.

In a 1926 paper published on the British typography journal The Fleuron, Beatrice Warde revealed her discovery that the Imprimerie nationale type had been created by Jean Jannon, something she had discovered by examining printing credited to him in London and Paris and through reading the work of Paillard.

By the time Warde's article was published some revivals had been released that were more authentic revivals of Garamond's work, based on period books and printing specimens. The German company Stempel brought out a crisp revival of the original Garamond typefaces in the 1920s, inspired by a rediscovered specimen from the Egenolff-Berner foundry in Frankfurt, as did Linotype in Britain.

Timeline

The Renaissance

• 1470 – first book printed in France, by a Swiss/German team at the Sorbonne, Paris. Early books printed in France use type of a blackletter design or influenced by it.
• 1496 – Aldus Manutius publishes De Aetna, a short text of poetry that serves as his first printing in the Latin alphabet. Its new 'roman' metal type sets a standard imitated by French printers.

Late Renaissance

• 1510 – Garamond may have been born around this time.
• 1530 – Robert Estienne begins to publish in a new and more elegant style of 'roman' type, influenced by De Aetna with its asymmetrical 'M'. These typefaces were once attributed to Garamond. Vervliet has argued that they are not by Garamond, but notes that the attribution of them to him begins quite early.
• 1541 – Garamond is advanced money to cut the Grecs du Roi type.
• 1561 – Death of Garamond.
• 1563 – Christophe Plantin buys matrices and other equipment in Paris at auction, some from Garamond's widow, for his partnership in Antwerp. Other equipment is bought by other Parisian and German printers; a specimen sheet identifying his types is issued by a Frankfurt foundry in 1592.
• 1560–70s – The work of Garamond and his contemporaries becomes very influential in the Low Countries and western Germany. A decline sets into the production of new typefaces, probably mostly due to simple saturation of the market with typefaces of acceptable quality, and possibly also due to economic and religious factors causing the emigration of printers and typefounders to other countries. Typefounding now a clearly separate industry to printing.

Early modern period

• 1580 – birth of Jannon
• 1621 – Jannon issues a specimen of his type.
• 1640 – Jannon leaves Sedan for Paris.
• 1641 – foundation of the Imprimerie Royale, which buys matrices from Jannon
• 1644 – Jannon's printing office in Caen is raided by authorities concerned that he may have been publishing banned material. Jannon is not imprisoned, but returns to Sedan.
• 1658 – death of Jannon

Eighteenth century

• 1756 – Parisian printer Jean-Pierre Fournier, who had inherited the Le Bé foundry, writes of his collection of vintage type that "I own the foundry of Garamond, the Le Bé family and Granjon. I shall be happy to display my punches and matrices to all those who are lovers of true beauty ... these are the types that made the reputations of the Estiennes, Plantin and the Elzevirs." However, his extensive collections are dispersed after his death in 1783 and ultimately 'traditional' old-style type falls out of use in France.

Early revival era

• Late nineteenth century – revival in interest in 'old-style' typefaces such as the Caslon type (1730s, England) and that of Jenson (1470s, Venice).
• 1912 – revival of the Imprimerie Royale (now Imprimerie nationale, following the revolution) type by the Peignot foundry.
• 1914 – Jean Paillard publishes a book arguing that the Imprimerie nationale type was not created by Garamond but his work attracts little attention. He is killed serving in the First World War a few months later.
• 1920 – a copy of the 1592 Berner specimen of typefaces is published in facsimile.
• 1923 – ATF issue a specimen of their Garamond revival, in development for several years prior. ATF's historian Henry Bullen privately tells Beatrice Warde, then a junior librarian, that he suspects that Garamond had nothing to do with the type, since he had never seen it in a contemporary book, but has no better candidate for its creator. Warde subsequently moves to Europe, becoming a freelance writer on printing and adviser to Monotype in London.
• 1925 – Based on the Egelhoff-Berner specimen, Stempel Garamond is released in Germany: later also released by Linotype, it is the first Garamond revival actually based on his work.
• 1923 – Monotype Garamond is published based on the Imprimerie nationale type.
• 1926 – Warde discovers and reveals that the Imprimerie nationale type was created by Jannon, and that all revivals based on it are not directly based on Garamond's work.

Contemporary versions

File:Many types of Garamond captions clearer.gif

Various modern revival typefaces using the name 'Garamond'. The topmost sample (Monotype Garamond), as well as those for Garamond 3 and ITC Garamond, are actually based on the work of Jean Jannon – note the steep, scooped-out serif of 'n'.

Based on Garamond's design

Adobe Garamond

Released in 1989, Adobe Garamond is designed by Robert Slimbach for Adobe Systems, based on a Roman type by Garamond and an italic type by Robert Granjon. The font family contains regular, semibold, and bold weights and was developed through viewing fifteenth-century equipment at the Plantin-Moretus Museum. Its quite even, mature design attracted attention on release for its authenticity to Garamond's work, a contrast to the much more aggressive ITC Garamond popular at the time. The OpenType version of the font family was released in 2000 as Adobe Garamond Pro, with enhanced support for its alternate glyphs such as ligatures, small caps and italic swash capitals, and is sold through Adobe's Typekit system. It is one of the most popular versions of Garamond in books and fine printing. Adobe Garamond has gained widespread attention and popularity as the font used in the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling.

Garamond Premier

Slimbach started planning for a second interpretation of Garamond after visiting the Plantin-Moretus Museum in 1988, during the production of Adobe Garamond. His visit there led him to conclude that Garamond could not be truly revived digitally unless in a set of optical sizes, with adaptations in the design for different sizes of text. Unable to create such a large range of styles practically with the technology and business requirements of the 1980s, he completed the project in 2005 with several optical sizes, each designed in four weights (regular, medium, semibold and bold, with an additional light weight for display sizes) using the OpenType font format. It features glyph coverage for Central European, Cyrillic and Greek characters including polytonics. Professor Gerry Leonidas, an expert in Greek-language printing, described it in 2005 as "bar none, the most accomplished typeface you can get for complex Greek texts". Adobe executive Thomas Phinney described it as a "modernized interpretation" different to their earlier Garamond, which remains on sale.

Stempel Garamond

A hot-metal period adaptation created by the Stempel Type Foundry in the inter-war period, and released through Linotype in other countries, that has remained popular. It is sharp, somewhat angular design with a crisp hook rather than a teardrop at top left of the 'a'. Stempel Garamond has relatively short descenders, allowing it to be particularly tightly linespaced. An unusual feature is the digit 0, which has reversed contrast, with the thickest points of the number on the top and bottom of the digit to make it more distinguishable from a 'o'.

Sabon

Main article: Sabon

Sabon is a Garamond revival designed by Jan Tschichold in 1964, jointly released by Linotype, Monotype and Stempel in 1967. It is named after Jacques Sabon, who introduced Garamond's types to German printing. An unusual feature of many releases of Sabon is that the italic, based on Granjon's work, is wider than most normal italics, at the same width as the roman style. This suited the hot metal typesetting machines of the period. Later Sabon versions, such as Jean François Porchez's Sabon Next, have not always maintained this principle.

Error creating thumbnail: File with dimensions greater than 25 MP

The open-source EB Garamond font, designed by Georg Duffner, showing the range of styles and two optical sizes.

EB Garamond

Released in 2011 by Georg Duffner, EB Garamond is a free software version of Garamond released under the Open Font License and available through Google Fonts. Duffner based the design on a specimen printed by Egelnoff-Berner in 1592, with italic and Greek characters based on Robert Granjon's work, as well as the addition of Cyrillic characters and OpenType features such as swash italic capitals and schoolbook alternates. It is intended to include multiple optical sizes, as of 2014 including fonts based on the 8 and 12 point forms on the 1592 specimen. It has been described as "one of the best open source fonts" by prominent typeface designer Erik Spiekermann.

URW++ Garamond No. 8

Garamond No. 8 is a freeware version of Garamond contributed by URW++ to the Ghostscript project, based on Stempel Garamond. Featuring a bold weight, small capitals, optional text figures and automatic ligature insertion, it is particularly popular in the TeX community and is also included on some Linux distributions. Originally released as a PostScript Type 1, it has been converted into the TrueType format, usable by most current software. It is distributed under the AFP license, which allows it to be used freely (without support) but not sold or have its distribution charged for.

Granjon

Main article: Granjon (typeface)

Despite the name, Granjon, by the English branch of Linotype, is based on the original Garamond roman with a Granjon italic. (Warde commented "It would seem that Garamond's name, having so long been used on a design he never cut, is now by stern justice left off a face which is undoubtedly his.") It was the favourite Garamond revival of many in the twentieth century, including Warde and Walter Tracy.

Based on Jannon's design

ATF Garamond/Garamond No. 3

American Type Founders created a revival of the Imprimerie Nationale typefaces around 1917, designed in-house by its design department led by Morris Fuller Benton under the influence of its historian and advisor Henry Lewis Bullen. It received a sumptuous showing, marketed especially towards advertisers, in ATF's 1923 specimen book. Also involved in the revival was book designer T.M. Cleland, who created a set of matching borders and ornaments.

The design became particularly known under the name of "Garamond No. 3" in a hot metal adaptation licensed to Linotype's American branch from around 1936 more practical to use than ATF's handset foundry type; the number distinguished it from Stempel's version and other variants which Linotype also sold. It was the style of Garamond preferred by prominent designer Massimo Vignelli.

Several digitisations have been made of both ATF's original Garamond and the Linotype adaptation. An adaptation with sans-serif companion by Christian Schwartz is the corporate font of Deutsche Bahn.

Monotype Garamond

Monotype Garamond's italic replicates the work of punchcutter Jean Jannon quite faithfully, with a variable slant on the capitals and swashes on many lower-case letters.

Monotype's 1922 design, based on Jannon's work in the Imprimerie Nationale, is bundled with many Microsoft products. Its italic, faithful to Jannon's, is extremely calligraphic, with a very variable angle of slant and flourishes on several lower-case letters. Its commercial release is more extensive than the basic Microsoft release, featuring additional features such as swash capitals and small capitals, although like many pre-digital fonts these are only included in the regular weight. Popular in the metal type era, its digitisation has been criticised for having too light a colour on the page for body text if printed with many common printing systems. This is a known problem with many Monotype digitisations of the period. Some publicity art for it in the metal period was created by a young Rodney Peppé. Monotype's 1933 guide to identifying their typefaces noted the asymmetrical T, the sharp triangular serif at top left of m, n, p and r, and a q unlike the p, with a point at top right rather than a full serif.

Garamont

File:Monotype Garamont sample 1.png

Sample of Monotype Garamont by Goudy, showcased in its magazine in 1923.

A revival by Frederic Goudy for the American branch of Monotype, the name chosen to differ from other revivals. An elegant sample created by Bruce Rogers was shown in a spring 1923 issue of Monotype's magazine. It like Monotype Garamond features a large range of swash characters, based on Imprimerie Nationale specimen sheets.

Mosley has described it as "a lively type, underappreciated I think." LTC's digitisation deliberately maintained its eccentricity and irregularity true to period printing, avoiding perfect verticals. In 1923, Morison at the British branch of Monotype thought it somewhat florid in comparison to the version of his branch which he considered a personal project, noting in a 1923 letter to American printer Daniel Berkeley Updike that "I entertain very decided opinions about this latest of Mr. Goudy's achievements ... a comparison leaves me with a preference for our version." He added that he "could not bring myself to believe" that Garamond himself had cut the swash capitals that "Mr. Goudy has done his best to reproduce".

Jannon

František Štorm's 2010 revival with optical sizes is one of the few modern revivals of Jannon's work. Štorm also created a matching sans-serif companion design, Jannon Sans.

Related fonts

Error creating thumbnail: File with dimensions greater than 25 MP

Three free and open source Garamond revivals.

As one of the most popular typefaces in history, a number of designs have been created that are influenced by Garamond's design but follow different design paths.

ITC Garamond

ITC Garamond was created by Tony Stan in 1975, and follows ITC's house style of unusually high x-height. It was initially intended to serve as a display version but was used for text, in which its tight spacing and high x-height gives it a somewhat hectoring appearance. As a result, it has proven somewhat controversial among designers; it is generally considered poorly proportioned for body text. It remains the corporate font of the California State University system in printed text. As seen below, it was also modified into Apple Garamond which served as Apple's corporate font from 1984 until replacement starting in 2002 with Myriad. Publishers using it included O'Reilly Media and French publisher Actes Sud.

Cormorant

An open-source adaptation of Garamond intended for display sizes, designed by Christian Thalmann and co-released with Google Fonts. It features a delicate style suitable for printing at larger sizes, and considerable contrast in stroke weight in its larger sizes. Thalmann added several unusual alternate designs such as an upright italic and unicase styles, as well as exaggerated, highly slanting accents.

Claude Sans

A humanist sans-serif based on the letterforms of Jannon's type, created by Alan Meeks and published by Letraset and later ITC.

In popular culture

This list focuses on notable references to Garamond or his typefaces, not including the extremely large number of books printed in them.

• In Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum, the protagonists work for a pair of related publishing companies, Garamond and Manuzio, both owned by a Mister Garamond.
• Garamond is the name of a character in the Wii game Super Paper Mario. He appears in the world of Flopside (the mirror-image of Flipside, where the game begins). He is a prolific and highly successful author, unlike his Flipside counterpart, Helvetica (a probable recognition of the relative suitability of the two fonts for use in book typesetting).
• For many years the masthead of British newspaper The Guardian used "The" in Garamond and "Guardian" in bold Helvetica.
• A condensed variant of ITC Garamond was adopted by Apple in 1984 upon the release of the Macintosh, known as Apple Garamond. This was a proprietary font not publicly available, less condensed than the publicly released ITC Garamond Condensed.
• One of the initial goals of the literary journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern was to use only a single font: Garamond 3. The editor of the journal, Dave Eggers, has stated that it is his favourite font, "because it looked good in so many permutations—italics, small caps, all caps, tracked out, justified or not."
• In Robin Sloan's fantasy novel Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore several character names derive from historical figures associated with the Garamond typeface.

Printer ink claim

It has been claimed that Garamond uses much less ink than Times New Roman at a similar point size, so changing to Garamond could be a cost-saver for large organizations that print large numbers of documents, especially if using inkjet printers. Garamond, along with Times New Roman and Century Gothic, has been identified by the GSA as a "toner-efficient" font.

This claim has been criticised as a misinterpretation of how typefaces are actually measured and what printing methods are desirable. Monotype Garamond, the version bundled with Windows, has a generally smaller design at the same notional point size compared to Times New Roman and quite spindly strokes, giving it a more elegant but less readable appearance. To make letters, especially the lower-case, as high as in an equivalent setting of Times New Roman, the text size must be increased, counterbalancing any cost savings. Thomas Phinney, an expert on digital fonts, noted that the effect of simply swapping Garamond in would be compromised legibility: "any of those changes, swapping to a font that sets smaller at the same nominal point size, or actually reducing the point size, or picking a thinner typeface, will reduce the legibility of the text. That seems like a bad idea, as the percentage of Americans with poor eyesight is skyrocketing." Professional font designer Jackson Cavanaugh commented "If we're actually interested in reducing waste, just printing less – using less paper – is obviously more efficient."

Gallery

• Plantin-Moretus punches 1.jpg

  Punches for metal type founding at the Plantin-Moretus Museum, Antwerp.

• Plantin-Moretus punches 2.jpg

  Punches at the Plantin-Moretus Museum.

• GaramondEstienne.jpg

  Type in a book by Jacques Dubois and printed in 1531 by Robert Estienne, a printer who was later a colleague of Garamond. Vervliet suggests that this type was not cut by Garamond himself but may have influenced him.

• 

  Monotype Garamond (based on Jannon) compared to the more geometric transitional serif and Didone type that replaced old-style type in the eighteenth century.

• Plantin-Moretus museum.jpg

  The Plantin-Moretus Museum, which preserves original type by Garamond.

• Bembo M.jpg

  The asymmetrical 'Bembo M', apparently the result of French artisans such as Garamond over-faithfully copying a glitch in Aldus Manutius's metal type. Shown in a Parisian mathematics textbook from 1556, greatly enlarged.

• 2007-05 PMM 03.jpg

  Type set up in a forme at the Plantin-Moretus Museum. The text is a sonnet by Plantin.

• 

  Christophe Plantin painted posthumously by Rubens.

• Woodcut title-page border printed by Simon de Colines (5428439118).jpg

  A woodcut title page printed by Simon de Colines, Robert Estienne's stepfather, in 1526. The font used exemplifies the style preceding the 1530s: a font that is quite dark in colour, with very wide capitals, tilted 'e's and large dots on the 'i' recalling calligraphy. De Colines, who engraved or at least commissioned his own typefaces, would later adapt his style to match the new style introduced by his stepson.

• ATF policy.jpg

  Writing in its new Garamond revival type, showcased in its legendary 1923 specimen, the printing equipment company ATF states its goal to 'discourage unhealthy competition' in the printing industry. (Its power collapsed considerably just six years later in the Great Depression.)

• 

  A large composition case with series 270-16 Bembo used to cast metal type on a Monotype large composition caster machine. These machines cast type controlled by a ribbon typed at a keyboard. The matrices are prepared using punches engraved with a pantograph cutting machine from large working drawings, giving much cleaner results than original matrices formed by stamping with a hand-cut punch.

• Monotype Garamont Type Specimen.jpg

  The American Monotype's Garamont specimen.

• Monotype Garamont sample 2.png

  Another page from Monotype's Garamont sample.

• 

  Optical sizes in EB Garamond. At top, correct use: Green is in a slimmer style designed for text printed large, and authority in a thicker style for text printed small. The bottom pair are the wrong way round: Green looks too stocky and authority too fine.

• Jannon and Jannon Sans.gif

  A sample image of František Štorm's revival of Jannon's type and his sans-serif derivative. Štorm added a bold, which did not exist in Jannon's time.

External links

On Garamond:

• Garamond at culture.fr: extensive website by the French Ministry of Culture
• Just what makes a "Garamond" a Garamond? – includes high-resolution image of the Egelhoff-Berner specimen.
• Garamond v Garamond: Physiology of a typeface (personal opinion by Peter Gabor, translated Barney Carroll)
• Illuminating Letters #1: Garamond
• Garamond discussion on Typophile

On revivals:

• ATF Garamond poster
• Garamond – Luc Devroye. A large assemblage of commentary on Garamond.

Font downloads:

• Garamond No. 8 – a modern ttf release with small caps.
• EB Garamond – specimen, specification and background.
• EB Garamond download site

Other

• 1742 Specimen of Claude Lamesle A specimen by a French commercial typefounder, showing the old-style French printing tradition towards the end of its 250-year span, with many fonts showcased around 200 years old. The sample is notable for its printing quality. Mosley: 'the most spectacular view that was published during the 18th century of the types of the 16th-century masters, newly cast from original matrices.' Vervliet attempts to provide attributions for many of the types in the book; many are by Granjon. PDF download available.