Garamond: The 500-Year-Old Font Still in Use Today

Open any serious book published in the past century. Look at the text type — the letters that make up the main body of the text. If the book aspires to quality, there is a reasonable chance that those letters descend, through however many hands and revivals and digital conversions, from the letterforms cut by a Parisian craftsman in the second quarter of the 16th century.

Claude Garamond died in 1561. His punches have been revised, recut, digitized, and renamed dozens of times since. The "Garamond" you use today is not what Garamond cut; it is an interpretation of an interpretation, sometimes of an interpretation of a misattribution. And yet the essential character of those letterforms — the proportions, the texture, the rhythm — persists across five centuries in ways that are not merely nostalgic. Garamond endures because it is, in deep formal ways, simply very good.

This is the story of a typeface, a craftsman, and the peculiar afterlife that attaches to truly foundational design.

Claude Garamond (c. 1480-1561)

We know relatively little about Claude Garamond's life. He was born around 1480, probably in Paris, and worked there as an engraver, type founder, and publisher. He learned his craft in the workshop of Antoine Augereau, one of the early Paris printers, and by the 1520s was working with the publisher and printer Simon de Colines. By the 1540s he was established as an independent type founder — one of the first in France — selling type to printers rather than casting it for his own press.

What we know of his character comes mainly from the typography itself and from the responses of his contemporaries. He was admired. The printer and scholar Robert Estienne (Robertus Stephanus), printer to the French king, used Garamond's roman type for books that were among the most elegant publications of the 16th century. Garamond's types were commissioned by the French king François I for a series of Greek types (the Grecs du Roi) that set a new standard for Greek typefaces. His work circulated through Europe, and by the end of his life his types were in use in presses across France, the Low Countries, and Germany.

What Garamond brought to type design was refinement. The roman tradition before him — established by Nicolas Jenson in Venice in the 1470s and developed by Aldus Manutius and his punch-cutter Francesco Griffo in the 1490s and 1500s — had already produced beautiful and legible letterforms. Garamond did not invent the humanist roman. What he did was optimize it.

The characteristic features of Garamond's type are easily identified once you know what to look for. The letters are elegantly proportioned: the capitals are somewhat shorter than the ascenders of the lowercase, creating a visual rhythm in mixed text that feels natural and unforced. The serifs are thin but not brittle, with gentle bracketing that smooths the transition from the main stroke. The stress — the angle at which the strokes thicken — is diagonal, reflecting the angle of the calligrapher's pen that underlies all humanist type. The lowercase 'e' has a distinctive feature: the crossbar is angled rather than horizontal, tilted in a way that suggests the pen held at an angle to the writing surface.

The overall effect is of warmth combined with precision. The letters are clearly the product of a craftsman who understood both the requirements of readability and the aesthetic pleasure of well-proportioned form. At text sizes — 10 to 14 points, the normal range for body text — a page of Garamond has a texture that is neither too dark nor too light, a gray tone that the eye can sustain through hours of reading.

Garamond died apparently in poverty in 1561. The rights to his punches were not clearly established, and after his death his equipment was dispersed. Much of it ended up with the Frankfurt publisher André Wechel and, later, with the Egenolff-Berner foundry in Frankfurt, which published a specimen of the types around 1592 that became an important reference for later revivals.

The Garamond Revival(s): Which Garamond Is Garamond?

Here is where the history becomes complicated — and genuinely interesting as a case study in how typographic traditions work.

In the early 20th century, a number of major type foundries decided to revive "Garamond" for machine composition. The revivals appeared almost simultaneously: Stempel's Garamond (1924), American Type Founders' Garamond (1917, revised 1919), Monotype Garamond (1922), and Linotype Garamond (1925). Each claimed to be based on authentic Garamond types.

Several of these revivals were based on a 17th-century specimen book from the Imprimerie royale in Paris, which showed types attributed to Garamond. The problem — not recognized until the 1920s and fully documented by type historians later — was that these were not Garamond's types at all. They were the work of Jean Jannon, a French Protestant printer who had cut types in the Garamond style around 1615. During the religious conflicts of the 17th century, Jannon's equipment had been seized by the French government and subsequently confused with Garamond's own material.

When type historians — particularly Beatrice Warde, writing in 1926 under the pseudonym "Paul Beaujon" in The Fleuron — established that the "Garamond" at the Imprimerie royale was actually Jannon, it created a definitional crisis. The revivals that had been marketed as Garamond were actually revivals of Jannon. Was the name now misleading? Should they be renamed?

Different foundries took different positions. Monotype eventually acknowledged the issue by calling its face "Garamond" with a note that it was based on Jannon. Other foundries kept the name unchanged. The commercial reality was that "Garamond" had become a brand, and brands are worth more than historical accuracy.

The confusion produced an interesting result: there are now several distinct "Garamond" traditions in use, with different formal characteristics:

The Jannon-based tradition includes Monotype Garamond, the widely used Adobe Garamond, and many of the most commonly encountered "Garamonds." These have somewhat more pronounced contrasts between thick and thin strokes than the originals, and slightly different letterform proportions. They are elegant and well-suited to text use.

The Garamond-based tradition includes faces that go back more carefully to Claude Garamond's actual punches — the Stempel Garamond, for instance, drew on punches that can be more reliably traced to Garamond himself. These tend to be slightly less contrasty, with a warmer, more even color on the page.

The synthesis includes more recent revivals that draw on multiple historical sources, trying to understand the common design principles rather than copying any single historical artifact.

Robert Slimbach's Adobe Garamond (1989), later revised as Adobe Garamond Pro, became the most widely distributed "Garamond" in the digital era. It is based primarily on the Jannon material but informed by Slimbach's deep study of the historical sources. It is, by common consent, one of the finest text typefaces produced in the digital era — warm, readable, and capable of great elegance in skilled hands.

The EB Garamond project, created by Georg Mayr-Duffner and available free under the SIL Open Font License, takes a different approach: it aims to recreate the look and feel of the 1592 Egenolff-Berner specimen as faithfully as possible, including period-appropriate ligatures and alternate letterforms. The result is a typeface with genuine historical depth — not a pastiche of historical type, but a careful reconstruction of it.

Garamond on the Web: EB Garamond and Cormorant

The web has been both a challenge and an opportunity for Garamond.

The challenge: Garamond's delicate thin strokes and refined serifs are demanding at small sizes on screen. Low-resolution displays and imperfect screen hinting can make the thinner strokes disappear, producing a type that looks spindly or uneven. Web designers using Garamond in the early years of web fonts often found that it required careful size and weight management to remain legible.

The opportunity: modern high-density screens — retina displays, OLED panels, 4K monitors — render Garamond's subtleties beautifully. At body text sizes on a modern screen, EB Garamond looks nearly as good as it does in a well-printed book. The technology has caught up to the requirements of the design.

EB Garamond on Google Fonts has become the standard open-source Garamond for web use. It is available in regular and italic, with a range of weights in the variable font version. The character set is extensive, including the ligatures and alternate forms that make Garamond's historical character legible in digital form. For book typography, academic writing, or any long-form content that benefits from classical authority, EB Garamond is an excellent choice.

Cormorant Garamond, designed by Christian Thalmann, is a different kind of Garamond revival: more interpretive, more contemporary, and in some ways more extreme. Thalmann pushed the contrast between thick and thin strokes further than most revivals, producing a typeface that is dramatically beautiful at large display sizes and sophisticated at text sizes. Cormorant also includes a remarkable range of stylistic variants: Garamond, Infant, SC (small caps), Upright, and Unicase. It's a scholarly and generous project, freely available on Google Fonts.

Both fonts demonstrate that the Garamond tradition is not static. Each revival interprets the historical material through the lens of its designer and its intended use. EB Garamond seeks fidelity; Cormorant seeks contemporary expression. Both are Garamond in the sense that matters: they participate in a conversation about form and legibility and historical beauty that Claude Garamond began in a Paris workshop in the 1520s.

For projects that need the authority of a serif typeface with genuine historical resonance but more contemporary proportions, Playfair Display or Libre Baskerville offer related aesthetic territory from different historical moments. And for pairing Garamond with a complementary sans-serif — a common need for body text with call-to-action buttons or UI elements — the font pairing tool can help identify combinations that maintain the classical register Garamond establishes.

Why Garamond Endures: Timeless Design Principles

The durability of Garamond demands an explanation. Five hundred years is a long time for anything to remain in use. The Helvetica story — another remarkably durable typeface — shows that longevity can come from cultural dominance, from ubiquity that becomes identity. But Garamond's durability predates the modern age of font licensing and corporate adoption. It persisted through the handpress era, the machine composition era, phototypesetting, and into the digital age. Something about the design itself must account for this.

The explanation lies in the principles behind the letterforms, which are aligned with deep human perceptual preferences that don't change with technology.

Reading rhythm. Garamond's proportions — particularly the relationship between x-height, cap height, and ascender/descender length — create a visual rhythm in text that is slightly more varied than fully rationalized types. The slight asymmetry between the heights of capitals and ascending lowercase letters (ascenders are a little taller than caps in Garamond, unlike in many later designs) creates a subtle vertical pulse that helps the eye track along lines of text without effort. This is the kind of perceptual ergonomics that can be identified analytically but is not consciously perceived by readers; it is felt as ease.

Modulated stroke width. The variation between Garamond's thick and thin strokes is derived from the natural movement of a broad-nib pen — thicker on downstrokes, thinner on cross-strokes. This modulation mirrors the visual patterns that human hands and eyes have produced and consumed for centuries. We are, in some sense, calibrated to read modulated type. The stroke contrast in Garamond is subtle enough to be comfortable at text sizes, dramatic enough to be beautiful at display sizes. This is a difficult balance to strike and Garamond strikes it consistently.

The serif structure. Garamond's serifs are the product of a specific historical and technical moment — the transition from written script to cut type, mediated by the humanist calligraphers of the Italian Renaissance. The angle and profile of the serifs is not arbitrary; it reflects the angle at which a calligrapher held a broad-nib pen. This gives Garamond's serifs a directional quality — they lead the eye along the reading line rather than creating static terminations — that contributes to reading ease.

The x-height choice. Garamond has a somewhat lower x-height than many contemporary typefaces — the lowercase letters are proportionally shorter relative to the capitals than in, say, Helvetica or Roboto. This gives the type a slightly old-fashioned appearance to eyes trained on modern typefaces, but it also gives it more differentiated letterforms. With more vertical space to work with (relative to the x-height), letters can have more distinct shapes, reducing the risk of confusion between similar letterforms. Long-form text typography benefits from this differentiation in ways that short-burst display typography does not require.

Color consistency. "Color" in typography refers not to the chromatic sense but to the visual darkness or lightness of a block of text — its tone. Garamond's character, spacing, and weight are calibrated to produce an exceptionally even, consistent page color. No words jump out because of irregular spacing; no letters dominate because of excessive weight. The text block reads as a unified field, which is precisely what long-form reading requires.

These are not accidents of historical style. They are solutions to the fundamental problem of text typography: how do you put language on a page in a form that can be sustained through hours of reading? Garamond's solutions have not been improved upon — they have been matched, in various ways, by various subsequent type designers, but not surpassed.

This is why Garamond endures. It is not nostalgia, though nostalgia certainly plays a role in its continued use. It is not fashion, though fashion has sometimes favored it and sometimes worked against it. It is the persistence of solutions to fundamental perceptual problems.

Five hundred years from now, the problems of text typography will be largely the same as they are today: how to put language into visual form in a way that the human visual system can process with ease and pleasure. Claude Garamond found answers to these questions in a Paris workshop. Those answers may not be the only good answers, but they remain among the best we have.

Explore EB Garamond and Cormorant Garamond in the font directory, or read about other influential type revivals in the history category. For technical details on the features that make oldstyle typefaces distinctive — optical size, old-style figures, swash alternates — the glossary has full explanations.