Setting Roman square capital letters against lowercase letters with a low x-height and oversized ascenders, Garamond created a font with high contrast between upper and lowercase letters, a gorgeous uppercase 'Q', and the most polished Roman font yet. Garamond’s Roman drew inspiration directly from Griffo’s more regular type, with unique modifications. By then, Parisian punchcutters Estienne and Colines had produced novel Roman fonts, using the horizontal ‘e’ enclosure introduced by Griffo, but tending towards Jensonian proportions and variations. His work in the Latin alphabet was different. G a ramond, by then, was already famous for his Greek types notably an expansive, complicated face featuring ligatures and alternate characters, which successfully replicate d the handwriting of France’s royal scribe. Needing a suitable replacement for the Griffo punches, he turned to French type founder Claude G a ramond. I n the mid-16th century, Aldus’s son, Paulus Manutius, upgraded the press’s equipment. In fact, it could go on without Aldus Manutius himself, who only outlived Griffo by a few years. Happily, b usiness at the Aldine Press could go on without him. Unhappily, G riffo was an explosive personality who would go on to beat his son- in-law to death with an iron bar. Aldus held the Venetian monopoly on printing using Griffo’s types, which forced Griffo to move away in order to sell his own work. This was a boon to readers and to Aldus himself, whose press thrived.Īs fruitful as the Griffo-Aldine collaboration was, Aldus and Griffo fell out. Encheridions were also cheaper to produce and purchase-a virtue enhanced by Aldus’s decision to print them without lengthy commentary or notes, as was typical at the time. They presented an advantage over larger books similar to what books held over scrolls: portability.
Aldus’s new, smaller books, encheridions, came in at a quarter that size. Early books were bricks: the Gutenberg bible was 30x40 cm and weighed as much as two bricks. Simply but crucially, he made De Aetna small. Īldus had his own book-making innovations to contribute. I t was the perfect choice for a personal, pastoral, and vernacular piece like De Aetna- readers could almost imagine Bembo seated atop Mount Etna, writing the book as he lived it. In the first BLKBK-esque fusion of script and font, Griffo c reat ed a gently sloping font that deliberately looked like like handwriting. Bembo himself was a practised hand, and Griffo took inspiration from his manuscripts. T hey’d modified their handwriting accordingly, incorporating Roman letterforms into sloping cursive writing. Humanist scholars like Pietro Bembo spent a lot of time reading Carolingian manuscripts and prints in Roman fonts.
So Griffo created something special, and it made a lot of sense. U sing a Roman font for something so special didn’t quite make sense. Īldus and Bembo shared a preoccupation with preserving classics, but De Aetna was a thoroughly modern, secular story a dialogue about a climb to a mountaintop.Originally, Aldus printed it in Griffo’s Roman t, but De Aetna wasn’t like anything printed before-it was nothing like any of the ancient texts Aldus wa nted to preserve. Bembo was a crucial architect of the Italian language with a penchant for lifting linguistic conventions from ancient Greek for use in his own Tuscan compositions. Type in hand, the Aldine Press’s next publication was another collaboration between Aldus and Bembo.
The punchcutter craft ed a particularly fine Roman, heavier but arguably more balanced than Jenson’s, with more uniform serifs and smaller capitals. In order to print Latin works, Aldus needed a Latin letter set, so he hired Franchesco Griffo. To this end, he collaborated with fellow humanist scholar, Pietro Bembo, and they soon produced the Aldine Press’s first book, a Greek grammar. In founding the Aldine Press, Aldus Manutius hoped to preserve the Greek and Roman classics. As the century approached its end, a humanist teacher and scholar in the vein of Petrarch acquired some of the deceased Nicolas Jenson’s printing equipment, and started a press. He created his own excellent Roman typeface-arguably more authentically Roman than the de Spiras’, but no less modern. Other printers had followed the de Spiras, among them a French printer named Nicolas Jenson who shared the de Spiras’ insight that print didn’t need to look like handwriting. How Venetian printers refined the Roman and reintroduced "handwriting"īy the end of the 15 th century Venice was the centre of European printing.
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