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.
This week we present Frederic Goudy’s Italian Old Style typeface as published in the Lanston Monotype Machine Company’s Italian Old Style, A New Type by Frederic W. Goudy, designed by the eminent American typographer and type and book designer Bruce Rogers and printed in Mount Vernon, N.Y., in a second edition of 11,000 copies by William Edwin Rudge in 1924.
Italian Old Style was designed by Goudy for Lanston Monotype of Philadelphia in 1924, and is based on early Venetian types of the latter part of the fifteenth century. In the printer’s note, Bruce Rogers observes that the new typeface "reminds me most strongly and admirably of Ratdolt's fine Roman." To present the type, Rogers chose text from English bibliographer Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s 1817 dialogue, The Bibliographical Decameron, stating that:
The conversation . . . was chosen partly for its own pleasant quality and partly because of its appropriateness to the purpose of this pamphlet. . . . the charm of [Dibdin’s] style is as engaging as ever and his taste in printing as unimpeachable; and this brief account of seven early Venetian printers, with its islands of text and oceans of commentary, supplies just the right material for displaying Mr. Goudy’s Italian Old Style under various requirements of composition.
For the type specimen displays, Rogers selects the traditional phrase “A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” to present the Roman fonts, but for the italics we are amused by his variations on the phrase “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs before five dozen FOXY JUDGES CRACK VALUABLE PEACH WINE & QUIZ ME.”
Once again, this slim but impeccably designed volume is a gift from our friend Jerry Buff.
View other posts showing types designed by Frederic Goudy.
On this first #Typography Tuesday of the year, we begin the New Year with American printer and type designer Frederic Goudy’s Goudy Thirty font. Designed between 1942 and 1945, this was the last typeface Goudy designed before his death in 1947. In fact, the design was commissioned by Lanston Monotype to be used only after Goudy’s passing as a way to commemorate him. The typeface, a “Gothicized” Roman, was not produced until 1953 and was never commercially successful, but many private press printers seem to have taken a shine to it, and it is currently available as a digital font through P22 Type Foundry. Why is it named “Thirty”? Apparently, “thirty” is a newspaper trade term that signifies “end of story.” As Alexander Lawson, a long-time professor of Graphic Arts at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), wrote in his essay on Goudy Thirty, “Anatomy of a Type,”
Now, after five centuries, we may have come to the end of he road as far as the design of new metal types is concerned, It is fitting that the last font of America’s great type designer is a letter in the spirit of the 15th century, a period which he loved so well and to which he returned for inspiration in so many of his types.
The images presented here are from the fine-press publication A Goudy Memoir: Essays by and about America’s Great Type Designer Frederic W. Goudy, printed in 1987 at the Yellow Barn Press in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in an edition of 150 copies. The Goudy Thirty type display above was set at Mackenzie & Harris in San Francisco, while Goudy’s statement “The Type Speaks” was handset in 18 point Goudy Thirty by Yellow Barn’s proprietor Neil Shaver, and hand-printed by him on dampened Rives paper on a Vandercook Universal III. The titling is set in Goudy Text, a Gothic typeface Goudy designed in 1928 based on the types used in Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible of 1454/55. The large initial that begins the statement was drawn by Goudy in 1932 for a Christmas card he issued that year. The Arts and Crafts-style pressmark is that of Goudy’s own Village Press, which he founded with his wife Bertha and American designer Will Ransom and ran from 1903 to 1939. The frontispiece photo of Goudy at the press was provided to Shaver by RIT.
View other works printed by Neil Shaver at the Yellow Barn Press.
View our other posts that feature types by Fred Goudy.
showing of decorative corners in Monotype Borders and Ornaments [p42], last section of the master catalog, Monotype Type Faces [n.d., but issued during frederic goudy’s tutelage—1930s-40s].
