Project Typography

Of the many reasons Aldus Manutius is celebrated, typography is near the top of the list. Aldus’ innovations^[1] in book typography are myriad: first his painstaking development of Greek type in the early 1490s; second, his “perfection” of roman type in late 1490s; and third, the development of a whole new type design: italic, in 1500–1501. Aldus’ italic appears intended to replace the roman altogether, and it almost did, through to the 1520s. But it’s the roman that ended up dominating book typography ever after.

In the late 1920s, Stanley Morison led the re-cutting of an Aldine-derived roman for the Monotype Corporation. It was called Bembo, in honour of Pietro Bembo’s De Aetna, which Aldus published in 1495 with the early version of his “perfected” roman. Morison wrote,

The type of the De Aetna equally marks a new epoch in typography. It is not a perfect piece of engraving (the capitals are heavy because they originated in the greek fount cut earlier), but the structure of the fount as a whole is above criticism. It is new in the type-design of fifteenth-century Venice.^[2]

Monotype’s Bembo was enormously successful; one of the most important typefaces in modern book publishing; thousands of trade books have been set in Bembo over the years (including many of Penguin’s “Classics”) and it continues to be used, in digital form, today, more than 500 years after it was originally cut.

Aldus’ roman type was a major influence on the French typographer Claude Garamond, half a century after Aldus. Morison argued that Garamond’s type was a refinement of Aldus’ model. Garamond’s type has gone on to be one of the most copied modern typefaces, existing in myriad versions from myriad type designers today.

For our project website, we wanted to feature typography that captured the look and feel of Aldus’ editions. Our initial pick was the excellent free font EBGaramond, an open-licensed version created by Georg Mayr-Duffner in 2011, and released in OpenType format in 2018. EBGaramond is a superb typeface, equal in quality to many commercially licensed fonts. It looks good, and it looks “Renaissance.” But… it’s not Aldine. It’s not quite on-brand.

So for some time I’ve been ‘passively’ looking for a free webfont^[3] to replace EBGaramond on our website. I’ve looked at some Aldine-inspired free fonts, and come away unimpressed… nothing I found had the sophistication with smallcaps and italics and old-style figures that we wanted for this project.

But then one of my students sent me an essay – I had asked them to send their essays as PDFs, and to please think about typography and not just use the defaults in Word or Google Docs. One essay arrived set in Bembo… except when I double-checked (using Acrobat Reader, which reveals font information under “Document Properties”) it turned out not to be Bembo but a font called “Cardo” – a free (open-source) font by David Perry in 2002. It looks like a re-drawing of Bembo but with a larger character set than Bembo would have had in 2002. Researching further, I then found yet another type designer, Michael Sharpe, who had created two more versions (this is what happens with open licensing: people build on each other’s work) for the LaTeX community: Fbb, and then a subsequent version called ETbb, which is a bit heavier. This looked very appealing to me, because Bembo itself can look quite thin and spindly in any context other than actual letterpress.^[4]

I read a little more about this font at the blog From Mind to Type where I learned that the “ET” in “ETbb” stands for Edward Tufte (author of such seminal design books as The Visual Display of Quanititative Information, 1983), who, it turns out, had commissioned his own typeface in 2006, based on Bembo, called ETbook.

Apparently the only people who cared about this particular typeface were from the LaTeX community – where there’s lots of typographic development going on if you look. So ETbb is a font which apparently derives from both Morison’s Bembo and Tufte’s ETbook, and which I was able to easily download as an OpenType font!

I have now replaced EBGaramond with ETbb on this website, and made a few tweaks to the spacing, and I’m quite happy with how it looks! And I’m especially happy with the extra provenance narrative that this provides! As with everything Aldine, there are more stories to tell!

Some Detail

In our CSS, I’ve specified old-style figures, enabled font-variant: small-caps (tracked out about 12%). I’ve been playing, with the body copy, tightening the word-spacing property quite a bit to make it set more like the Aldines: quite a bit more snug than modern, post-hot-metal typography. That allows the leading to be tightened up a bit too. But it doesn’t play well in all browsers; in any case this is all just initial iterations; I’m sure we’ll fine tune this more in the months to come.