I’ve known about this for one or two years now, and intend to include it in my design of Didot from this period, but I thought it would be neat to share this small nook in type history with you all now.
I’m sure many of you are familiar with the later Greek typeface by Didot. An example in Hymne d'Aristote à la vertu: essai d'un caractère grec (1832):
I have relied mainly upon three Didot manuscripts (a set of three volumes, 1789–1790) for my design, and early on while looking through some of the footnotes I came across this in the third volume (1790):
Three instances of Greek, distinct from the later design shown previously. As I have been parsing through many other Didot manuscripts, this is still the only instance I have seen it used. Before talking about it more I’ll share with you an instance of Greek from the footnote of an introductory letter in the first volume (1789) and another instance from the same letter from when it was first published in 1784, in that order:
I’m not entirely sure if the Greek shown in 1784 and 1789 are a| a very early experiment by Didot b| a design from someone working with the Didots, or c| a general design available to printers of the time. But what held my attention was the 1790 design. I know there is talk about latinizing other scripts, but one thing I have grown to respect in Didot’s typefaces is how he was able to harmonize his designs across languages.
Is it rough in places, yes, but I do like it. Let’s get into some of the interesting features. Look at that /omicron and how he differentiated it from the Latin /o with the little terminal cutting into it, giving it a bit of a top-of-a-fruit look. The /ζ doesn’t have a hook at the bottom, appearing to end in a teardrop terminal. The /α reminds me of how he handled his italic /x. The x-height also seems to be equal with the Latin type, where it is slightly smaller later on. On a different branch, refined on its own, separate from the very beautiful Greek we see later, I think it could be made even more a group of beautiful letters in its own right.
But what are your thoughts on it? Is it heresy against Greek type design or a lovely bit of Greek type, or anything in between?
Comments
The 1790 example looks very much like Bodoni's Greco 21, one of his few non-slanted Greeks:
Personally, I find Bodoni's Greeks too idiosyncratic, and of the 18th Century experiments in new styles of Greek types Didot's — as in your 1832 example — was by far the most successful.
Didot’s 1832 design had another idea, better than crazy stress—“left-handed” stress. That makes it related to another famous transgressive-stress type of the same era, Caslon’s Italian of 1821.
Porson’s Greek was more authentic, I think, because he was a scholar who wrote a lot of Greek, and it seems to derive more closely from writing script, than be a predominantly typographically-informed concept.
I interpret the mature Didot style as regularising the dominant stress pattern of the cursive Greek. That's why it is more successful that Bodoni's, which tries to resolve the Greek letters within a Latin stress pattern.
Here's another part of the history: this is the Byzantine cursive style as written with a split nib pen by Louis Barbedor in the mid 17th Century (and copied directly by Bickham in the Universal Penman a hundred years later), i.e. an early attempt to interpret Greek letters with an expansion stroke model and with more consistency of stress angle. If you ignore the heavily ligated connections and just look at the pattern of the individual letters, you can see how this contributes to Didot's eventual breakthrough.
Re. Porson, it's representative of how Greek was written by an English scholar, which I wouldn't necessarily characterise as 'authentic' in terms of how Greeks write the script. Notably, it is a style of type that has had almost no use at all within Greece, and is mostly associated with the study of Classics in Britain and North America, through its use in the Loeb Library.
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* Lots has been written on the subject of the contribution of native scholars to early Greek type. See e.g. Nicholas Barker's Aldus Manutius and the development of Greek script and type, and Constantine Staïkos' Charta of Greek printing.
That’s backwards.
If one is writing quickly, it is much easier to keep the pen at a consistent angle, rather than continually wrist-twisting and elbow-shifting (those are simultaneous movements involved in changing the angle of stress of a broad-nibbed pen).
At least, that’s my experience.
However, perhaps with a quill changing stress angle may be done by rolling its thin barrel between one’s fingers. (I’ve never used a quill.)
But even that seems like a superfluous level of activity to add to a scribe or secretary’s work, and with any significant amount of pressure on a pointed nib (to generate contrast), it slows the writer down a lot, because the angle has to be exactly aligned with the pen’s direction.
If one is writing slowly, there is time to finesse the letters, such as by varying stress angle and lifting the (broad) nib onto a corner and dragging.
I meant authentic in the sense that Porson’s type was a representation of the writing of someone who wrote (“authored”) a lot of Greek, not that of a type designer who probably did not.
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In general, the workaday, less formal scribal work (in whatever writing system) did not have a lot of contrast. I conjecture that while it provided a good model for letter forms, contrast and angled and baroque stress were added by type designers, and those features increased during the high-contrast neoclassical and early 19th century era.
In that manner, they “upgraded” quick scribal style with the finish of slower, more formal work.
The Byzantine cursive involves a lot of complex joining behaviour, including offset vertical letters, which perhaps contributes to the variation in rotation. It's not like a Latin running hand in which the joins between letters are mostly consistent with the stroke pattern of the letters themselves.
In any case, the fact remains that Aldus' and other Venetian cursive Greek types were based on the handwriting of scholars such as Marcus Musurus, and reflects the qualities of that writing. My assumption is that some of those qualities arise from it being a secretarial cursive hand, as distinct from the formal Byzantine book hand, and hence that speed played some role in those qualities. I may be wrong in that, but I would be cautious about comparing speed and resultant qualities in one writing system with that in another.
In this example by Marcus Musurus (Burney MS 96, f 144r), there is not much stroke width contrast, but from what there is, it is apparent that the pen has been held at a consistent angle, with heavier horizontals. And this is emphasized throughout by the extravagant tonos accents, which stitch the text to the layout. To increase weight in vertical stems he created solid loops (especially in mu), and at the bottom of descenders by letting the pen linger and/or overwrite slightly, producing a “blob” terminal—it wasn’t done by changing nib angle. This feature was imitated by Griffo for Aldus, and much later became a thematic device in the Didot shown above.
While the Didot follows much of the putative pen movement and alignment in the Musurus sample, one can see where Didot has “cheated” and applied different (crazy) angles of stress, notably in the evenness of the thick horizontals of sigma and tau, compared with the thick diagonals of alpha, kappa, lambda and chi, and the thick vertical right stem of mu—three quite different and deliberative angles. These thick, even strokes in a variety of angles may be reproduced by nib rotation, but not at speed, where even thickness is pretty much limited to one direction. I theorize that they are typographic enhancements which addressed Didot’s desire for pronounced contrast in text type: contrast in stroke thickness, and contrast with the consistent angling of stress in Latin types.
Would there perhaps have been a cultish taste for Byzantine esoterica in the the Aldine Nea Akademia?
Gerry Leonidas
https://www.atypi.org/members/publications/type-1/a-primer-on-greek-type-design
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2417759_From_Unicode_to_Typography_a_Case_Study_the_Greek_Script
http://www.typophile.com/node/89492
https://archive.org/details/handbookgreekan00thomgoog/page/n136
In terms of Aldine book production, I think the use of the cursive style of Greek needs to be understood relative to Latin italic, not to roman. Aldus is famous for his 'pocket books', i.e. small format volumes set in italic type, mimicking the informal manuscript books of the humanist scholars. The cursive Greek types share the same inspiration, and are suited to the same kind of book production.
The interesting question, then, is why didn't Greek typography subsequently evolve the same kind of dual use of styles for distinction and articulation as roman/italic? Instead, Greek type modelled on the formal Byzantine book hand dies out pretty early, and is not significantly revived again until the 20th Century, most successfully in Scholderer's New Hellenic.
For scholars no doubt, but in relation to the expanding market for books which printing had produced, Aldus’ italic pocket books were highly accessible to the general reader, who wrote their native language, and Latin, in a similar-looking hand, one presumes—but would the average Greek reader/writer have been familiar with the convoluted Byzantine style?
After looking a bit more at the Aldine Greek, it seems that it’s much less complex than the Musurus verse above. But I am puzzled as to why there are so many ligatures for letters ending in a horizontal stroke at x-height (tau, theta, pi, sigma etc.) as well as gamma, when followed by a vowel. Although it was impractical, I can only conclude that the purpose was to support the idea that the style is cursive and connected.
I would imagine that it was a great relief to Aldus (not to mention Griffo) when he subsequently produced an italic type based on Sanvito’s hand with its quite discrete letters.
The roman is too stiff, according to Gerry Leonidas, but Yannis Haralambous quite liked it, because of the high contrast, which he considered appropriate for Greek, no doubt because it’s well established in Monotype’s Apla and Times fonts.
The reason I made the roman stiff was not just because I consider such severity to be suitably neoclassical, but because I designated the classic Greek style for the italic. I reasoned that a Latin-Cyrillic-Greek type system should have a consistent “roman” and “italic” throughout. Using the classic scripty style for the upright Greek didn’t seem to fit into the overall multi-script scheme, in which the italic is otherwise the scripty partner.
I don’t consider that to be Latinization of the default Greek per se, but a necessary consequence of the roman/italic duality—and thus modernization and internationalization.
I did provide some quaint alternates in a stylistic set, though (bottom line).
There is also a matching sans serif, Figgins, which follows the same scheme.
Something I've observed in repertoires of Greek fonts is that very often smaller sizes of types have more ligatures than larger sizes. I think the reason for this is that these smaller types are frequently used in marginal notes and other places where space is at a premium, and a lot of ligatures horizontally compress text content.
Sequences of consonant + vowel(s) are extremely common, of course, and a lot of Greek ligatures represent either full syllables or syllable-initial sequences.
Reproduction of wood engraved by cliché on a metal plate