Garamond font history

Claude Garamond

One of the fathers of typography.

• 1480: Born in Paris.
• 1510: trains as a punch cutter with Simon de Colines in Paris.
• 1520: trains with Geoffroy Tory.
• 1530: Garamond's first type is used in an edition of the book "Paraphrasis in Elegantiarum Libros Laurentii Vallae" by Erasmus. It is based on Aldus Manutius' type De Aetna, cut in 1455.
• 1540: King Francis I commissions Garamond to cut a Greek type. Garamond's ensuing Grec du Roi is used by Robert Estienne in three sizes exclusively for the printing of Greek books.
• 1545 onwards: Garamond also works as a publisher, first with Pierre Gaultier and later with Jean Barbe. The first book he published is "Pia et Religiosa Meditatio" by David Chambellan. The books are set using typefaces designed by Garamond.
• 1561: Dies in Paris.
• After Garamond's death, Christophe Plantin from Antwerp, the Le Bé type foundry and the Frankfurt foundry Egenolff-Bermer acquire a large proportion of Garamond's original punches and matrices.
• Garamond (or: Garamont) typefaces used nowadays should in many cases be at
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  Claude Garamond

  Most likely born in 1499 in Paris, Claude Garamond began an apprenticeship as a book printer in 1510 in the workshop of the humanist, engraver and typographer Antoine Augereau. His first typographical works probably date back to the beginning of the 1530s, a notable example being the so-called Cicero typeface which was re-cut by his countryman Jean Jannon in 1620 and distributed under the name Garamond.

  Garamond is today considered the creator of the first complete Antiqua typefaces of the Renaissance period, which he developed on the basis of a number of Italian precursor designs. In 1539 he received, by royal decree, his own type foundry and three years later he cut the so-called grecs du roi (“the Greeks of the King”) typefaces for King François I. This cemented his reputation as a master typographer and earned him the title of Royal Type Founder. Very little exact information still exists on the circumstances of Garamond’s life. He is known to have trained large numbers of apprentices at his workshop premises and his main source of income was the sale of type

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  Garamond

  Typeface family

  For other uses, see Garamond (disambiguation).

  Garamond is a group of many seriftypefaces, named for sixteenth-century Parisian engraver Claude Garamond, generally spelled as Garamont in his lifetime. Garamond-style typefaces are popular to this day and often used for book printing and body text.

  Garamond's types followed the model of an influential typeface cut for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius by his punchcutter Francesco Griffo in 1495, and are in what is now called the old-style of serif letter design, letters with a relatively organic structure resembling handwriting with a pen, but with a slightly more structured, upright design.

  Following an eclipse in popularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, many modern revival faces in the Garamond style have been developed. It is common to pair these with italics based on those created by his contemporary Robert Granjon, who was well known for his proficiency in this genre.^[1] However, although Garamond himself remains considered a major figure in French printing of the sixteent