Exhibition Hall at the Grolier Club (photo from Grolier Club website)

Oh fortunate man, I successfully lured my wife, Gay, into the august halls of New York City’s Grolier Club on our whirlwind two-day holiday trip to the city!

The Grolier Club, with a clubhouse in midtown Manhattan, is one of America’s oldest associations of bibliophiles. It can never hope to compete with the blockbuster exhibits of the Metropolitan or the MOMA. But Gay had suffered through hours in line at the Metropolitan this fall and still missed the exhibit of Alexander McQueen’s high fashion dresses, “Savage Beauty.” She was potentially piqued enough to give the Grolier’s five-centuries-with-no-waiting exhibit a glance.

The Grolier Club exhibition, “Printing for Kingdom, Empire, & Republic: Treasures from the Archives of the Imprimerie Nationale” successfully satisfied Gay’s taste for books, especially the antique and the unique.

And, after all, how could the exhibition, collected from the vaults of the French government’s official printing works, disappoint? As suggested by the exhibition’s title, this “printing office”, like the book itself, has survived centuries of regime change and only been enriched in the process. Founded as the Imprimerie Royale in 1640 by Cardinal Richelieu, it was the exclusive printer for the French government, whether royal, imperial, or republican.

Decades before Richelieu established the Imprimerie, the French king had been served by royal printers. A royal company of printers (Imprimeurs du Roy pour le grec) had been established by François I in 1538 as waves of Renaissance change rolled through France carrying the infant technology of printing with movable type. A royal committee set about creating their own typeface to print the works in Greek needed to satisfy a growing hunger for books. It was this group which appointed Claude Garamond (Garamont) to create a suite of types based on the hand writing of the royal scribe Angelo Vergetio. The Greek font was soon followed by a Roman font, and the rest of the story is typographic history.

On display as one of its premier treasures, is a collection of the steel punches engraved by Claude Garamond to create this first sixteen point Greek cursive font. Garamond’s design of a roman minuscule based on Vergetio’s calligraphy and a roman italic based on the handwriting of his assistant Robert Granjon became the standards which would guide the hands of type designers for the next half millennium.

Garamond died in 1561, but with the establishment of the Imprimerie Nationale, his type designs evolved in the hands of successive punch cutters. In 1827, a type specimen of a Garamond-like font created in 1621 by Jean Jannon was discovered, but unfortunately not attributed to him until the twentieth century. During the reign of Louis XIV, and after the creation of the Impriemerie Royale, a new “King’s Roman,” the “Romain du Roi,” was cut in steel by Phillippe Grandjean (Grandjon).

Here exhibited in the Grolier’s cases are the actual steel punches and brass matrices used in the creation of this essential type face, the Romain du Roi. Huge steel punches for the creation of 120 point type are the central attraction. These monsters make quite clear the work required to design the intricate shapes we now call type.

What is all this about steel punches and brass matrices? Gutenberg’s movable type was cast from lead, a metal easily accessible and moldable for medieval craftsman due to its low melting point. In order to cast a piece of type or a sort, a mold had to be created. And preferably a reusable mold. Thus a finely crafted brass matrix would become the cradle for the casting of the dozens of sorts which would fill one small compartment in a font’s type case. To create this matrix required the skills of jewelers. They knew how to create this mold by carving special steel punches which could be hammered into the softer brass to create the exact impression which became the mold for a letter of type. Thus the first type designers, like many of the early illustrators of the printed book, came from the jeweler’s benches of Europe.

The Grolier exhibition displays hundreds of the many thousands of steel punches and brass matrices in their vaults. Included in the exhibition are punches for many foreign alphabets including Tamil, Cambodian, Brahman, Javanese, Khmer, and Tibetan among many others.

And what is it that is so remarkable about seeing these unique sculptural objects? How do they illuminate my understanding of the story of the design of our printed alphabet? The key is in that word “sculptural.” Type emerged from the artist’s hand in three dimensions not on the two dimensional flat plane of a piece of paper!

In the late 1980s I had the great pleasure to work with Warren Chappell, a book and type designer who had actually worked in Germany cutting punches with another great type designer, Rudolf Koch. Warren impressed on me repeatedly that type is a sculptural object, that the making of it involved the crafting of shapes in steel, not just the drawing of the outline of a letter. When I spent time with Warren, drawings of letters were all the rage as digital type was just being born as a new printing technology.

So as I perused the cases of objects selected for display from the collections of the French Imprimerie, I finally grasped the nature of a letter as a three-dimensional object. Here it is, I can see it in all of its hefty glory! And I can see the impression it makes as it is stamped into brass to create a matrix. It is not just the picture of a letter; it, like the Roman letters inscribed in stone, has dimensional form.

Included in the exhibition are engraved copper plates made by the Imprimerie’s type designers to stand as records of the design of each letter. In these prints, along with the outlines of the letter, are engraved the lines of construction. These are the guide lines used by the artist in drawing these letters–perfect circles and lines of proportion. It is these guidelines that interest me. Since the Renaissance, artists have studied letters and attempted to describe the rational essence of their beauty by discovering the mathematical proportions at work in their creation. The fifteenth century calligrapher Felice Feliciano had written a treatise on the classical proportions of letters in 1463, the Alphabetum Romanum, appearing just eight years after Gutenberg’s Bible was printed in a font to imitate the calligraphic hand writing of the time. In 1525, Albrecht Dürer published his own rationalized instructions for constructing letter forms. And as recently as 1982, the artist and calligrapher David Lance Goines offered a new and detailed treatise on the construction of the roman alphabet.

But, as I walked through the exhibit, it became clear to me that try as we may to capture the beauty of a letter form with mathematical understanding, the letter form is still the product of the craftsman’s hand and eye working with a material which has its own contributions to make to the final form of the letter. Just as the Romans had discovered of the concept of entasis — that to make a column look truly vertical it must actually be cigar shaped — the slight bulge accommodating the light as it sneaks around the sides of the column and narrows it in the middle, the type cutters of the Renaissance understood the minute effects of line and curve as they filed and honed their letter forms.

I left the Grolier Club with a renewed since of awe for the craftsman who carefully crafted the lines and curves of each and every letter of type (with different designs for every point size created within a typeface). They listened not to the rational ideal of beauty found in following mathematical guides, but instead to the aesthetic sensibilities that they had mastered from working long hours with tools and materials. Through experience they had discovered the perfection of form required to create the perfect letter form.

Josef Beery has worked at Ten Flavors Studios in Charlottesville, Virginia as a publication designer for almost three decades. He is a cofounder of the Virginia Arts of the Book Center and an early organizer of the Virginia Festival of the Book. He shares observations on the fields of typography, printing, and books to promote discussion and interest in the activities of the VABC.