Book Description

The Plantin-Moretus Museum has one of the world's richest collections of type specimens, many surviving nowhere else. They include types by Garamont, Granjon, Van den Keere, Briot, Van Dyck, Kis, Fournier, Rosart, Gille, Didot and many other masters from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Since the Plantin-Moretus printing office acquired most of the specimens when new, moreover, the collection as a whole tells a story in a way that collections assembled piecemeal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries cannot. Finally, the Museum's archives help to document the origins of many specimens. This first detailed catalogue of the Museum's specimens reports the styles and sizes of type shown, describes the structures and paper stocks, notes relations with other specimens in the collection and elsewhere, and provides references to literature on many of the individual types shown. Preliminary notes on the type founders and printers who issued the specimens include chronologies of the foundries and information on the origins of their materials, sometimes supplemented with information about the history of the firms and the genealogy of the founders. Nearly all of the nineteen specimens illustrated at their original size appear here for the first time, and extensive indexes make this book a powerful reference tool for type specimen enthusiast and printing historians.