CLAUDE GARAMOND
U&lc XII/2, 1986.
author: Allan Haley

Claude Garamond spent much of his time dissatisfied. Ironic, because today he is considered one of the most respected, influential, and important individuals in typographic history. His skill was such that he received a royal commission from the French court to create a series of typefaces, and his work was in demand by the finest printers of 16th-century France. He was one of the first to establish type founding as an enterprise. Clearly, Garamond was the most important type designer and punch cutter of his time. And yet he wanted more.

Garamond’s work brought him into close contact with the most prominent, influential, and wealthiest patrons of the French book arts. This was the source of his dissatisfaction, for he soon became disenchanted with his own small opportunities and profits as a type designer and founder. In the introduction to a book on which he collaborated, he complained that his work “feathers the nest of publishers and brings honey to their hive.” Perhaps the mixed metaphors indicate Garamond’s mixed feelings about his profession.

THE DISTINGUISHED PIONEER OF TYPE

Garamond was the most distinguished type designer of his time, perhaps of the entire Renaissance. A true typographic innovator, he was instrumental in the adoption of roman typeface designs in France as a replacement for the commonly used gothic, or blackletter. He was one of the first type designers to create obliqued capitals to complement an italic lowercase and to create an italic design as the companion to a roman type style. Garamond was a pioneer.

Garamond’s genius was released because of the influence of another. Geoffroy Tory was Garamond’s mentor. Tory was a true Renaissance scholar, a many-sided genius. Originally a teacher of philosophy, he developed an enthusiasm for and love of typography and the graphic arts. This led to energetic experimentation in engraving, printing, and eventually publishing.

Tory was a native of France but spent several years in Italy. His Italian sojourn profoundly affected Tory’s work and philosophy. By the time he returned to France, he had established himself as a bookseller, engraver, and printer. Soon he became the most powerful Italian influence in these crafts. Tory brought warmth, balance, and humanity to the French book arts.

Garamond was one of Tory’s most ardent followers. Thus it was that the type Garamond created under Tory’s direction followed the roman style of letter then prevalent in Italy. Through Tory’s enthusiastic influence and Garamond’s remarkable skill as a type designer and punch cutter, roman letterforms began to replace blackletter as the French typographic norm. It has been said that, were it not for the work of Garamond, the French—like the Germans—would have been reading blackletter well into the 20th century.

The genealogy of the current English alphabet is mixed and complicated. The present standard of a root design for capitals, small capitals, lowercase letters, numerals, and corresponding italic and bold designs began in the sixth century but was not given a popular typographic form until the work of Garamond.

SLANTED LETTERS

The first typefaces were upright designs: the gothics of northern Europe and the romans of Italy. There were no italics. Italic typefaces evolved from the common written hand and were first cast in metal to solve an economic problem. In the Renaissance, knowledge through reading first became accessible to common people, but books were still very elaborate and expensive. Sensing the need and economic opportunity for a reasonably priced product, publishers began to issue books that were more utilitarian in design. Rich ornamentation and grand illustrations were the first embellishments to disappear from these forerunners of the modern “paperback.” Next, the size of books was reduced to save paper. As books became smaller, type was designed in smaller sizes. Readability soon began to suffer. In an attempt to return acceptable levels of readability to these inexpensive books, printers began to cast type based on calligraphic letterforms and proportions, because they took less space than traditional romans. The first italics normally consisted of only lowercase characters; when capitals were needed, the printer pulled them from the roman font.

Like many other designers of the period, Garamond also created italic typefaces for this new kind of book. But his italics had complementary sloping capital letters. Although he did not start this trend, his designs were so important that they set the precedent for future work by others. Perhaps even more basic to current standards of typeface design, Garamond’s italics were created as harmonious counterparts of roman typefaces. Before Garamond’s works, italics and roman typefaces were viewed as two separate typographic tools with distinctively different purposes. Garamond created orderly and elegant typefaces in which all the parts—capitals, lowercase letters, and italic variants—are balanced contributors to the typographic whole. Because of his creativity and regard for typographic integrity, it is unlikely that Garamond’s first italics would have been mere copies. About this time, Garamond began to resent the financial differences between himself and the publishers for whom he worked. Garamond reasoned that if he published books as an adjunct to his type founding business, he could begin to rectify the differences in monetary rewards. The trouble was that publishing was a very expensive business to enter. Garamond eventually found a business partner, Jean de Gagny, then chancellor of the Sorbonne. De Gagny promised to give financial aid, provided that the type designer would produce “as close a copy as possible of the italic letter Aldus Manutius.” (The Aldine italic was the most popular choice for 16th-century French book work.) Garamond agreed, and accordingly, the scheme went forward. Two italics were cut and shown to potential collaborators. The results were deemed favorable, and in 1544, Garamond presented his italic to the French court and was granted a three-year copyright to the design. The following year, his first book was published. In all, five books were jointly published by Garamond and his collaborators. In 1546, however, Garamond gave up his publishing career, having enjoyed little financial success or personal satisfaction.

GARAMOND STARTS A TRADITION

Garamond is generally credited with establishing the first type foundry. He was the first designer to create faces, cut punches, and then sell the type produced from the punches. Unfortunately, Garamond also had little success in this business. In fact, when he died he owned little more than his punches, and shortly after his death in 1561, his widow was forced to sell even these.

While Garamond was not personally successful, his typefaces certainly were. Eventually they became popular throughout Europe. They found their way to Holland via Christopher Plantin; to Germany through Andre Wechel, the executor of the Garamond estate; and to Italy via Guillaume Le Be, one of Garamond’s students. Garamond’s work was emulated and copied in nearly all of literary Europe. In France, Garamond’s work became a national style; his punches were used to create and inspire the creation of many type fonts. Some of his punches were even identified as having become part of the original equipment of the French Royal Printing Office, established in Paris by Cardinal Richelieu almost a hundred years after Garamond’s death. Richelieu used the type, referred to as the Caracteres de l’Universite, in the printing of his book Les Principaux Poincts de la Foy Catholique Defendus. It is on this type that most of the modern Garamonds are based.

As with most typestyles, the Garamond designs did not enjoy uninterrupted popularity. After a time, new French designs and styles created by English, Dutch, and Italian foundries, began to replace Garamond’s type as the design of choice among printers. It wasn’t until the beginning of the twentieth century that new versions of the Garamond style began to appear again in print shops.

One of the first modern Garamonds, Morris Fuller Benton’s design for American Type Founders in 1919, met with almost instant success, and other major foundries brought out their versions in quick succession. In 1921, Frederic Goudy completed Garamont, a similar design inspired by the same source, for Lanston Monotype. The English Monotype Company followed in 1924 with its own interpretation of Garamond, again inspired by the Caracteres de l’Universite. Once again, the Garamond designs were immensely popular.

In 1926, however, a lengthy and well-documented article by Paul Beaujon, The Fleuron, established that Jean Jannon, who worked more than 80 years after Garamond’s death, was the first to bring out these first Garamond revivals. Jannon was a printer and punch cutter in Paris. Early in his career, he came into contact with, and was obviously impressed by, the original work of Garamond. In the early 17th century, Jannon’s Protestant sympathies took him to Sedan, north of Paris, where he worked in a Calvinist academy.

Because Jannon had difficulty securing tools and materials for his work, he made many of his own. Type was one such tool. Over a period of time, friction between Jannon and the authorities in Sedan resulted in his return to Paris. He took his type and punches with him and worked for only a short time before his Protestant leanings got him into trouble. Jannon was forced to leave Paris, again, but not before his type and punches were confiscated by the government. These eventually found their way into the French National Printing Office, where they were used by Cardinal Richelieu. The type was then placed in the Printing Office archives, where it remained in obscurity for more than two hundred years.

In 1845, the type was rediscovered and pressed into use by the Imprimerie National in Paris, which, two years later, printed two specimen books showing the type and attributing it to Garamond. At the turn of the century, the director of the French National Printing Office studied the material and affirmed that the type was indeed the work of Claude Garamond.

MORE THAN THE TRUTH ABOUT GARAMOND IS DISCOVERED

Paul Beaujon discovered a specimen book of Jannon’s in The Mazarin Library in Paris. After careful and exhaustive research, Paul Beaujon proved that the Garamond types residing in the National Printing Office were actually the work of Jannon, a revelation that caused a sensation in the typographic world. This discovery was perhaps equaled only by the revelation that the man Paul Beaujon was actually a woman, Beatrice Warde, writing under a pseudonym. Printing and typography were “man’s business” at the turn of the century and Ms. Warde must have believed that no one would believe the theories of a mere woman. This “mere” woman, however, went on to become a major force at the English Monotype Company and one of the most celebrated historians of the typographic arts. Few people (men or women) have surpassed her accomplishments.

Meanwhile, other Garamond designs were being created. These were based on the type produced by Claude Garamond himself. George Jones of England in 1924 created a design based on an original Garamond. It was released by Linotype & Machinery of London, and for some unknown reason it was not named Garamond, but Granjon, who was a contemporary of Garamond’s. In 1925, both Mergenthaler Linotype and Stempel Released designs based on the actual type of Claude Garamond.

THE STYLE CONTINUES

The Fleuron article did little to affect the popularity of the Jannon-based Garamond designs. In fact the styles became so popular that they were duplicated by other foundries: Interetype, in 1927; Mergenthaler Linotype, in 1936; and Monotype, in 1938. To distinguish them from earlier designs, the Linotype version is called Garamond No. 3, and the Monotype is American Garamond.

Over a period of five years, International Typeface Corporation released a large Garamond family of 16 designs. This most recent addition to the Garamond lineage brought the design concept full circle. ITC Garamond was created as a harmonious family of faces in which all the variations are balanced contributors.

Thus, the irony: that the designs of a dissatisfied type designer who died penniless would influence the design of a score of typeface families bearing his name and that the various versions would account for some of the most consistently popular type styles of the last 75 years.

Like most people, Garamond had frailties. Unlike most people, he was exceptionally talented and profoundly creative. He was responsible for popularizing the current standards of harmony in type family development, and for providing the typographic community with one of its most elegant communication tools.