Garamond

Claude Garamond (c.1500–1561) was a Parisian punch cutter and type designer whose work in the 1530s and 1540s established typographic conventions that remain foundational today. The types bearing his name represent one of typography's most remarkable stories of influence and attribution — a design tradition that spans five centuries, multiple revivals, and some productive historical confusion about exactly which historical sources the modern versions trace back to.

Garamond worked during the height of the French Renaissance, cutting type for the Parisian book trade at a moment when printing was transforming European intellectual life. His roman types — refined from the humanist letterforms of the Venetian printers, particularly the influential work of Aldus Manutius and his punch cutter Francesco Griffo — achieved a new standard of elegance and legibility. Garamond's letterforms had a warmth and organic flow that made extended reading comfortable, derived from the pen-written humanist scripts of 15th-century Italian scholars.

The historical attribution of "Garamond" types is complex and fascinating. After Garamond's death, his punches were sold and dispersed. When 20th-century type designers created "Garamond revivals," many drew from matrices preserved in the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp — only to later discover that these types were actually cut by Jean Jannon in 1615, a French Huguenot designer who clearly worked in Garamond's tradition but adapted the forms. The Garamond types at the Plantin collection (cuts used by Christopher Plantin) are now considered more authentic, but the confusion enriched rather than diminished the tradition.

This means that different "Garamond" fonts available today descend from somewhat different historical sources:

• Adobe Garamond (Robert Slimbach, 1989) — based on surviving Garamond specimens and Sabon research
• EB Garamond (Georg Duffner, open source) — based on the Egenolff-Berner specimen of 1592, a contemporaneous sample sheet
• Cormorant Garamond (Christian Thalmann, Google Fonts) — a fresh interpretation in the old-style tradition

/* Using Garamond tradition typefaces from Google Fonts */
body {
  font-family: 'EB Garamond', Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;
  font-size: 1.125rem;
  line-height: 1.75;
}

/* Cormorant for display/editorial use */
h1 {
  font-family: 'Cormorant Garamond', 'Palatino Linotype', serif;
  font-weight: 600;
  font-style: italic;
}

Garamond typefaces share characteristic features: angled serifs derived from the chisel-cut pen, a relatively small x-height (lowercase letters are small relative to capitals), diagonal stress in curved strokes (the thinnest part of an O tilts left), and moderate stroke contrast. These features produce text that reads with an antique elegance — warmly bookish, never mechanical.

The influence extends beyond revivals. Garamond's approach to type — elegant, readable, rooted in the human hand — defined the "old-style" typeface category. Typefaces in this tradition, from the original 16th-century cuts through their 20th-century revivals and contemporary interpretations, remain among the most widely used and respected typefaces for book typography and premium editorial design.