![]() However, other revivals of Aldine/French renaissance typefaces followed from several hot metal typesetting companies in the following decades, including Monotype's own Poliphilus, Bembo and Garamond, Linotype's Granjon and Estienne and others, becoming very popular in book printing for body text.Ī sample image of Plantin created by Fontshop, showing infant styles and the condensed "News" and "Headline" styles sold for newspapers. The choice to revive a French renaissance design was unusual for the time, since most British fine printers of the period preferred either Caslon or revivals of the fifteenth-century style of Nicolas Jenson (recognisable from the tilted 'e'), following the lead of William Morris's Golden Type, both of which Monotype would also develop revivals of. Both were recruits to Monotype from the German printing industry. Plantin was designed and engraved into metal at the Monotype factory in Salfords, Surrey, which was led by Pierpont and draughtsman Fritz Stelzer. Vervliet (2008) suggests that these may have been a set of slightly different custom sorts cut by Granjon. (It has been reported that Plantin himself had used a few letters of the font to supplement another font, a Garamond, but H. ![]() The Granjon font on which Pierpont's design was based was listed as one of the types used by the Plantin-Moretus Press beginning in the 17th century, long after Plantin had died and his press had been inherited by the Moretus family. ![]() The Plantin-Moretus Museum, created in 1876 from Plantin's collection which had been preserved and added to by his successors, is notable as the world's largest collection of sixteenth century typefaces, leading Pierpont to visit it to research the topic. This was actually a bold design based on Caslon, with no connection to Plantin but it was also a design advertised as being highly legible, so Dreyfus suggests it may have prompted the choice of design and name. 1910 family from the Shanks foundry known as "Plantin Old Style" may have been an inspiration. It was suggested by James Moran and John Dreyfus that the existence of a c. The Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, a visit to which provided source material for Plantin's design.Īt the time Plantin was released, Monotype's hot metal typesetting system, which cast new type for each printing job, was developing a reputation for practicality in trade and mass-market printing, but the designs offered by Monotype were relatively basic choices, such as a "modern" face, an "old style" and a Clarendon. The Plantin family includes regular, light and bold weights, along with corresponding italics. Plantin would later also be used as one of the main models for the creation of Times New Roman in the 1930s. ![]() It can in retrospect be seen to have paved the way for the many Monotype revivals of classic typefaces that followed in the 1920s and 30s. Plantin was one of the first Monotype Corporation revivals that was not simply a copy of a typeface already popular in British printing it has proved popular since its release and has been digitised. ![]() In preparing the design Monotype engineering manager Frank Hinman Pierpont visited the Plantin-Moretus Museum, which provided him with a printed specimen. The intention behind the design of Plantin was to create a font with thicker letterforms than were often used at the time: previous type designers had reduced the weight of their fonts to make up for the effect of ink spread or to achieve a more elegant image, but by 1913 innovations in smoothing and coating paper had led to reduced ink spread. ![]()
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