Original subtitles

In our first case study, we're going to

look at the story behind an early

typeface, today known as Bembo, that

was designed in the late 15th century.

Before Johannes Gutenberg introduced

movable type to Europe, books were

handwritten by scribes, many of whom

worked in monasteries. These books took a

lot of skill and labor to produce. They

were rarefied, valuable objects, and

marks of prestige for their owners.

When Gutenberg developed his system of

movable type in 1439 and began

printing and selling books, it made sense

for him to try to simulate the look and

feel of these handmade books as closely

as possible. So his early

typefaces imitated the handwriting style

of scribes in northern Europe.

This style was called a blackletter, and

it remained popular in parts of Europe

into the 20th century.

Gutenberg was so intent on simulating

human handwriting with his type that he

developed dozens of slightly different

versions of each letter to try to

simulate the irregularities of human

handwriting. In the

late 1400s, printing technology started

moving south from Germany to Italy, and

especially to the prosperous port city of

Venice. Type designers, or

punch cutters as they were called because

they carved the letter forms at actual

size into the punches used to cast type,

started making type that imitated the

writing style of Southern European

scribes. This writing style was

called humanist minuscule, or just Roman

script. And as you can see, it's the

style of letters that we're most familiar

with today. The most

influential figure in the Venetian

printing scene was Aldus Manutius,A

publisher who ran a press called the

Aldine Press, Manutius was the

first publisher to successfully produce

books cheaply and in large quantities for

a more mass audience, rather than just

for elite customers. In

around 1495, Manutius commissioned a

prominent punch cutter, Francesco Grifo,

to create a typeface for his press, and

the result was what we now call Bembo.

Digital versions of Bembo actually

originate from a redrawing of Manutius's

design by the American type designer

Stanley Morrison in the 1920s.

The name is taken from a book of poetry

by Pietro Bembo, in which Grifo's

typeface was first used.

In Manutius's day, books were printed on

expensive vellum, animal skin, rather

than on paper. In an effort to save

money by cramming as much text onto each

page as possible,Manutius also

commissioned Grifo to draw one of the

first italics. Italics

were based on another, less formal style

of Southern European script. If you

carefully compare an italic typeface to a

Roman typeface, you'll see that there's a

lot more difference than just the slanted

angle. The shapes of the letters

themselves are actually quite different.

And in fact, italic type was not

initially designed to go together with

Roman type. That only happened later.

Early Roman-style typefaces from the 15th

and 16th century, like Bembo, are

often referred to as old-style serif

typefaces. This style is

characterized by a strong calligraphic

flavor. Some common features of

old-style typefaces are a tilted

axis, bracketed serifs,

serifs that have a curved connection to

the rest of the stroke, and a small

x-height. Because of their

age and their association with books, we

tend to associate typefaces like Bembo

with literature, classicism and the

Middle Ages.