The Garamond Types

Considered in The Fleuron

No. 5

One of the most famous articles on the history of printing

ever published is Beatrice Warde’s 1926 article in the
Fleuron. Written under the pseudonym of “Paul Beaujon”,
it proved that the “Garamond” Latin-alphabet typefaces
in the collection of the Royal Printing office of Paris were
not cut by Claude Garamond but by Jean Jannon,
working more than fifty years later. Warde is critical of
Jannon’s work, especially its eccentric italic in which the
capitals have different slant angles.

The article was recently digitised by the French

government, as part of its website on the history of
Garamond and his work, and is still worth reading despite
later research by Carter, Vervliet, and others proving
some of its conclusions to be incorrect.

The font used is Barbou, Monotype’s more obscure

attempt at digitising the eighteenth-century work of
Pierre-Simon Fournier. It was not put into mass
production, unlike their other “Fournier”, which became a
common-ish book typeface in Britain around the 30s and
40s, and it hasn’t been digitised, although Stanley
Morison preferred it – hence its appearance in his
magazine. Monotype manuals distinguish it from their
other try by its four-terminal lower-case ‘w’ and a slightly
splayed 'M’. (Fournier itself seems to have rather dropped
off the map in recent publishing, maybe because it
doesn’t have a bold – if you wanted something like it but
with one Berthold’s Bodoni Old Face is actually quite
similar.)

Besides a history of printing in France, Warde’s essay

gives an assessment and specimen of many (all?) of the
Garamond revivals then in existence. Based on Jannon
comes that of her past employer American Type
Founders (her colleague there, Henry Bullen, told her of
his suspicions about this “Garamond”, saying that he had
never seen it in a book from the right period), Monotype’s
in America (Goudy’s “Garamont”) and in Britain (the one
installed, in a horribly scrawny digitisation that
emphasises all its most eccentric features, with Office).
Based on Garamond’s work (or his contemporaries) come
Linotype Granjon (her favourite), the Fonderie Ollière in
Paris (never digitised?) and Stempel Garamond (she
wished that they could recut its descenders longer than
common line permitted).

Speaking 30 years later to the BBC, Warde commented:

“I wanted a pen name. I wasn’t quite sure at that time
(which is a long time ago) that women would be taken
quite as respectfully. I thought that if I was going to have
a pen name, I might as well have a man, and I took a
Frenchman’s at that, to make it a little more mysterious.

And they all thought this learned Frenchman wrote

English remarkably well. They were particularly interested
that he was quoting Lewis Carroll, they didn’t think that
many elderly Frenchmen knew how to quote from The
Hunting of the Snark.”