A few weeks ago I read the Epic of Gilgamesh for the first time, and despite the fact that the origins of the story are probably from the mid-3rd millennium BCE, and the earliest cuneiform tablets we know the story from date from the late 2nd millennium BCE, the narrative’s emotional frame, and the frank depictions of sex, violence, fear, longing, and friendship, all felt remarkably contemporary to me. Just last week, Gilgamesh came up again in a discussion during a session of my course on the History of Books and Printing. Since Gilgamesh has had a recurring presence in my life this past month, I’ve decided to highlight some images and text from our copy of the Limited Editions Club production of Gilgamesh, translated by William Ellery Leonard and printed in 1974 at The Stinehour Press in Lunenberg, Vermont, in an edition of 2,000 copies.
The book includes nine bold three-color woodcuts and seven black-and-white woodcuts and linocuts by the American visual artist Irving Amen (1918-2011), who also signed the entire edition. The text is printed in the Club's proprietary eighteen-point Janson type, with thirty-six-point Trump Gravure wedge-serif capitals for the titles. The woodcuts beautifully capture every significant scene in the epic. Click on the images to view the captions.
Janson is an old-style serif typeface named for the 17th-century Dutch printer and punchcutter Anton Janson (1620–1687), but was in all probability, if not in fact, designed and cut by the Hungarian punchcutter Miklós (Nicholas) Kis (1650–1702). Several modern revivals were produced in the twentieth century, including for D. Stempel AG in Frankfurt in 1919, and Mergenthaler Linotype of New York (under typographic director C. H. Griffith) and Lanston Monotype in Philadelphia (under associate art director Sol Hess) in 1937. British Monotype released a version called Ehrhardt under the influence of Stanley Morison in 1938. In 1951, Hermann Zapf extended the Stempel fonts with 24- and 48-pt sizes, and redesigned the German Linotype Janson fonts for 6-, 8-. 9-, and 10-pt. sizes. Monotype’s version was digitized by Patricia Saunders and Robin Nicholas in 1985.
Kis traveled to Holland in 1680 specifically to learn typography and managed to secure the services of the well-known punchcutter Dirk Voskens. Kis proved to be an unusually adept student, becoming proficient in less than half the time of most apprentices. He was printing books in his own type at Amsterdam by the late 1680s (see Bible title page above), but returned to Hungary in 1690. Before returning however, he appears to have left some matrices in Leipzig where some time in the 1720s and 1730s the Ehrhardt type foundry issued specimen sheets of the types (see example above), that appear to be the origins of the typeface’s attribution to Janson. Kis's surviving matrices were eventually acquired by Stempel, which perpetuated the Janson origin and from which the 20th-century revival all began. The restoration of Kis as the font’s designer was established in research articles by Harry Carter and George Buday in the 1950s and 1970s.
The Lanston Monotype publication by Sol Hess that was issued to introduce their Janson design offers side by side comparisons with Monotype Garamond and Caslon (shown here), stating:
In both roman and italic, Janson is a trifle heavier than the other two. The characters are inclined to be narrow and closely fitted. Caslon is decidedly the lowest face of the three -- by comparison it appears to be of a smaller point size. The roman lowercase Caslon, and to a lesser extent the capitals, are rounder in form than those of Janson. Both the roman and italic of Janson are distinguished by crisp, strong features.
It also offers a handy chart (also shown here) of “A Few Chracteristics of Monotype Janson.” The examples shown here are from:
Janson: An Authentic Revival of a Classic Book Face, adapted to the monotype by Sol Hess. Philadelphia: Lanston Monotype Machine Company, 1937.
Die Original-Janson-Antiqua: Zur Rehabilitierung des Nikolaus Kis Porträt einer Schrift 1683-1983 by Horst Heiderhoff. Neu-Isenburg: Edition Tiessen, 1983.
Anatomy of a Typeface by Alexander Lawson. Boston: Godine, 1990.
