The Palaeotypography of the French Renaissance: Selected Papers on Sixteenth-Century Typefaces, and: French Renaissance Printing Types: A Conspectus (review)

During the sixteenth century, types made by punchcutters in Paris and Lyons, the great centres of printing in France, and in some areas under French influence, entered into use in many countries. The work of Claude Garamond, Robert Granjon, Pierre Haultin, François Guyot, Guillaume Le Bé, and others, cast in different sets of matrices that had reached Antwerp, Venice, Rome, Frankfurt am Main, Amsterdam and London, can be seen in books that were printed across a large part of Europe during the next two centuries. Writing in the Mercure de France in 1756, Jean-Pierre Fournier, the owner of the foundry of the Le Bé family in Paris, which possessed the original materials of Garamond's workshop and the work of some other contemporaries, and could cast their types for sale, claimed, with some justice, that these types had helped to make the reputations of Plantin and the Elseviers.

The force of such appeals to the reading public became ever more diluted after the radical changes of style that took place in printing types towards the end of the eighteenth century and during the civic confusion of the Revolution, and had largely ceased when the old types fell out of fashion and the punches and matrices of the Le Bé foundry, together with many related materials, vanished without trace. During the nineteenth century the one name that retained a certain nostalgic glamour, mostly on account of his Greek types, the so-called grecs du roi, was that of Claude Garamond (or Garamont, the spelling that he probably used himself and which Dr Vervliet, perhaps rightly, prefers). His name was wrongly applied to a few matrices for roman and italic types of the seventeenth century that survived among matrices at the Imprimerie nationale in Paris and were used again for casting in 1900. In the later nineteenth century, a well-meaning Flemish bibliographer, finding some of their types in the specimen of a Dutch founder, unjustly denied the entitlement of French artists to any credit for the legendary fame of the 'Elzevir letter'.

The story of the recovery of a more reliable picture of French sixteenth century printing types is worth recording briefly. In 1920, a facsimile was published of a specimen from the type foundry in Frankfurt am Main that was managed successively under the names of Sabon, Berner, and then Luther, and which had come to light shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. The editor was Gustav Mori, one of the most perceptive of the German typographical scholars. This sheet, dated 1592, showed a range of roman and italic types accompanied by the names of their makers, size by size, the romans by Garamond and the italics by Granjon, identifying the work of the French masters with some precision (although one of the 'Garamond' romans is a type now attributed to Granjon). Its appearance at this date made it a kind of Rosetta stone of typography, resolving as it did much existing confusion over the work of individual punchcutters.

Two other reasons can be identified for the greater confidence with which French types of the sixteenth century are now identified, and both have something to do with the historical curiosity of Stanley Morison, and his talent for encouraging others to follow lines of enquiry that he favoured. One was the find by Olive Abbott, a talented researcher working in France on behalf of Morison, of some archival documents that had associations with Jean-Pierre Fournier. She identified, in the Archives nationales, the...