Plantin (typeface)

File:Plantin-Moretus punches 1.jpg, the masters used to stamp matrices used to cast metal type, at the Plantin-Moretus Museum. Its unique collection of original sixteenth-century matrices and punches inspired the Plantin design.]]

File:Antwerp Belgium Museum-Plantin-Moretus-05.jpg, a visit to which provided source material for Plantin's design.]]

At the time Plantin was released, Monotype's hot metal typesetting system, which cast new type for each printing job, was developing a reputation for practicality in trade and mass-market printing, but the designs offered by Monotype were relatively basic choices, such as a "modern" face, an "old style" and a Clarendon.

James Moran and John Dreyfus suggested that an inspiration for the design may have been a c. 1910 family from the Shanks foundry known as "Plantin Old Style", advertised as highly legible.{{cite web|title=Plantin Old Style : typeface synopsis issued by P M Shanks & Co Ltd., typefounders, London, c1910 (image: Mike Ashworth)|date=16 April 2019 |url=https://www.flickr.com/photos/36844288@N00/46906184434/in/photostream/|access-date=2022-12-02}} This was actually a bold design based on Caslon, with no connection to Christophe Plantin or Granjon, but Dreyfus suggests it may have prompted Monotype to research Christophe Plantin and the collection of the Plantin-Moretus Museum.{{cite book|last1=Dreyfus|first1=John|title=Into Print: Selected Writings on Printing History, Typography and Book Production|date=1995|publisher=David R. Godine|location=Boston|isbn=9781567920451|pages=116–124|edition=1st hardcover}}

The Plantin-Moretus Museum was created in 1876 from Plantin's collection which had been preserved and added to by his successors in business. It is notable as the world's largest collection of sixteenth century typefaces.{{cite web|last1=Mosley|first1=James|author-link=James Mosley|title=The materials of typefounding|url=http://typefoundry.blogspot.co.uk/2006/01/materials-of-typefounding.html|website=Type Foundry|date=2006-01-06|access-date=14 August 2015|archive-url=https://archive.today/20240730130105/https://typefoundry.blogspot.com/2006/01/materials-of-typefounding.html|archive-date=2024-07-30|url-status=live}} Although Plantin commissioned types from Granjon, according to Hendrik Vervliet the specific type Pierpont's design was based on began to be used by the Plantin-Moretus Press only in the 18th century, after Plantin had died and his press had been inherited by the Moretus family.{{cite book|author=Hendrik D. L. Vervliet|title=The Palaeotypography of the French Renaissance: Selected Papers on Sixteenth-century Typefaces|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=6sidSDlif48C&pg=PA226|year=2008|publisher=BRILL|isbn=978-90-04-16982-1|pages=226–7}} (It has been reported that Plantin did use the long letters of the type as replacement letters to cast a type by Garamond shorter height, but Vervliet suggests that these may have been a set of slightly different characters cut by Granjon separately.{{cite web|last1=Mann|first1=Meredith|title=Where Did Times New Roman Come From?|url=http://www.nypl.org/blog/2014/12/09/times-new-roman|publisher=New York Public Library|access-date=2 February 2016}})

Plantin was designed and engraved into metal at the Monotype factory in Salfords, Surrey, which was led by Pierpont and draughtsman Fritz Stelzer. Both were recruits to Monotype from the German printing industry.

The choice to revive a French Renaissance design was unusual for the time, since most British fine printers of the period preferred either Caslon or revivals of the fifteenth-century style of Nicolas Jenson (recognisable from the tilted 'e'), following the lead of William Morris's Golden Type, both of which Monotype would also develop revivals of. However, other revivals of Aldine/French renaissance typefaces followed from several hot metal typesetting companies in the following decades, including Monotype's own Poliphilus, Bembo and Garamond, Linotype's Granjon and Estienne and others, becoming very popular in book printing for body text.

File:Old Style.jpg, a delicate reinterpretation of pre nineteenth-century printing styles that became popular in the late nineteenth century. While offering a version of it as one of their first faces, Monotype in creating Plantin aimed to offer a more solid design that would print clearly.]]

The design for Plantin preserved the large x-height of Granjon's designs, but shortened the ascenders and descenders and enlarged the counters of the lowercase 'a' and 'e'. Not all the letters were Granjon's: the letters 'J', 'U' and 'W', not used in French in the sixteenth century, were not his, and a different 'a' in an eighteenth-century style had been substituted into the font by the time the specimen sheet was printed.{{cite book|last1=Mosley|first1=James|chapter=Reviving the Classics: Matthew Carter and the Interpretation of Historical Models|editor1-last=Mosley|editor1-first=James|editor2-last=Re|editor2-first=Margaret|editor3-last=Drucker|editor3-first=Johanna|editor4-last=Carter|editor4-first=Matthew|title=Typographically Speaking: The Art of Matthew Carter|date=2003|publisher=Princeton Architectural Press|isbn=9781568984278|pages=31–34|chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=WqXd_w4S4SsC&pg=PA32|quote=Plantin was a recreation of one of the old types held at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, of which a specimen, printed in 1905, had been acquired by Pierpont on a visit. The type from which the specimen was printed was not only centuries old and worn almost beyond use, but it was contaminated with wrong-font letters (notably the letter ‘a’) and the italic did not even belong to the roman. The revival, derived by Monotype from an indirect and confused original, is as sound a piece of type-making as was ever created in the 20th century…behind the foggy image of the roman type lies the...'Gros Cicero' Roman of Robert Granjon, acquired by the Plantin printing office after the death of its founder.}}{{cite web|last1=Mosley|first1=James|title=Comments on Typophile thread|url=http://www.typophile.com/node/53050|website=Typophile (archived)|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111013140635/http://www.typophile.com/node/53050|access-date=16 December 2016|archive-date=2011-10-13|quote=The consensus appears to be that not only the wrong-fount a in the cases at Antwerp but also the italic that Monotype adapted for their Plantin (which can be seen on that first page of the 1905 specimen) may be the work of Johann Michael Schmidt (died 1750), also known as J. M. Smit or Smid.}}{{cite journal |last1=Lane |first1=John A. |author-link=John A. Lane|title=Arent Corsz Hogenacker (ca. 1579-1636): an account of his typefoundry and a note on his types Part two: the types |journal=Quaerendo |date=1995 |volume=25 |issue=3 |page=163 |doi=10.1163/157006995X00017 |quote=Most of these sixteenth-century types were originally cut without the letters J, U, and W, which were added in the seventeenth century.}}

The 1742 specimen of Claude Lamesle (notable for its printing quality) provides a specimen of the Granjon type in its original state.{{cite book|last1=Lamesle|first1=Claude|title=Épreuves générales des caracteres|date=1742|page=55|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=4gr11pmlvgoC}} Mosley has close-up images of some characters of the face.{{efn|A better-quality digitisation of the whole specimen is available but it does not include this leaf.{{cite book|last1=Lamesle|first1=Claude|title=Épreuves générales des caracteres|date=1742|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Fy3g7OP-VV8C}}}}

File:Plantin Fontshop.gif, showing infant styles and the condensed "News" and "Headline" styles sold for newspapers.]]

With its relatively robust, solid design compared to the Didone and "Modernised Old Style" faces popular in the early twentieth century (which Monotype already had made versions of), Plantin proved popular and was often particularly used by trade and newspaper printers using poor-quality paper in the metal type period and beyond. Monotype's advertising emphasised its popularity with advertisers, highlighting its use in the "Mrs Rawlins" series of adverts for washing starch.{{cite journal|title=Monotype (advert)|journal=Modern Publicity|date=1930|page=187|url=http://magazines.iaddb.org/issue/MP/1930-01-01|access-date=15 March 2017}}{{cite journal|last1=Warde|first1=Beatrice|title=Twenty Years of Advertising Typography|journal=Advertiser's Weekly|date=1932|page=130|url=http://magazines.iaddb.org/issue/ADW/1932-07-28/edition/1000/page/42?query=|access-date=15 March 2017}}{{cite web|last1=Hackney|first1=Fiona Anne Seaton|title="They Opened Up a Whole New World": Feminine Modernity and the Feminine Imagination in Women's Magazines, 1919-1939|url=https://research.gold.ac.uk/7998/1/Redacted_History_thesis_Hackney.pdf|publisher=Goldsmith's College (PhD thesis)|access-date=15 March 2017}}{{cite book|author=Lucy Lethbridge|title=Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-century Britain|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=BY7ynqJmRKsC&pg=PA187|date=14 March 2013|publisher=A&C Black|isbn=978-1-4088-3407-7|pages=187–8}} As the basic font is relatively dark on the page, Monotype offered a 'light' version as well as a bold, which Hugh Williamson describes as "particularly suitable for bookwork."{{cite book|last1=Williamson|first1=Hugh|author-link=Hugh Williamson (book designer)|title=Methods of Book Design|date=1956 |publisher=Oxford University Press|url=https://archive.org/details/MethodsOfBookDesign/page/n95/mode/2up|page=81}}

During the interwar period the face was adopted and popularized by Francis Meynell's Pelican Press and by C. W. Hobson's Cloister press, and also used occasionally by Cambridge University Press. A custom version, "Nonesuch Plantin" was also cut for Meynell's Nonesuch Press, one of the first fine printers to use Monotype machines, with extended ascenders and descenders on the lower-case.{{cite web|last1=Steeves|first1=Andrew|title=Poetry Books for the Trala|date=14 April 2011|url=http://gaspereaupress.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/poetry-books-for-trala.html|publisher=Gaspereau Press|access-date=12 March 2017}} Type designer Walter Tracy noted that this changed the type's appearance to a surprising extent: "it look[s] not only more refined but as if it derived from another period: Fournier's, say [in the eighteenth century], not Granjon's."{{cite book|last1=Tracy|first1=Walter|title=Letters of Credit|pages=50–1}} It was appropriately used by the Bodley Head to print Meynell's autobiography.{{cite book|author=Joseph Rosenblum|title=A Bibliographic History of the Book: An Annotated Guide to the Literature|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VhUG9Dd77g4C&pg=PA407|year=1995|publisher=Scarecrow Press|isbn=978-0-8108-3009-7|pages=407–8}} Monotype also created a condensed version, News Plantin, for The Observer in the late 1970s.{{cite journal|last1=Luna|first1=Paul|title=Small Print|journal=Designer|date=1986|quote=The first national to install a Lasercomp, it overcame the lack of suitable text faces by commissioning its own, a slightly condensed version of Plantin.}} An infant variety of the typeface called Plantin Infant also exists,{{cite web|title=Plantin Infant Font |url=https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mti/plantin-infant/|access-date=14 January 2022}} with single-story versions of the letters 'a' and 'g' and a 'y' with two straight sides.

The font was used as the signature font for ABC News from 1978 until 1999. In more recent usage, the magazine Monocle is set entirely in Plantin and Helvetica.{{cite web |url=http://fontfeed.com/archives/in-use-plantin-for-monocle |first=Stephen|last=Coles |title=In Use: Plantin for Monocle |date=February 13, 2009 |access-date=2009-12-23 |publisher=FSI FontShop International |work=The FontFeed}} The body text of all Magic: The Gathering cards is also set in Plantin.

File:Times ancestors.png, Baskerville, and Plantin. Times is most based on Plantin, but with taller letters and its appearance "modernised" by adding eighteenth- and nineteenth-century influences similar to Baskerville and Perpetua, in particular enhancing the stroke contrast.]]

Plantin was the basis for the general layout of Monotype's most successful typeface of all, Times New Roman.{{cite web|last1=Rhatigan|first1=Dan|title=Time and Times again|url=http://ultrasparky.org/archives/2011/09/time_and_times_.html|publisher=Monotype|access-date=28 July 2015}}{{cite journal|last1=Hutt|first1=Allen|author-link=Allen Hutt|title=Times Roman: a re-assessment|journal=Journal of Typographic Research|date=1970|volume=4|issue=3|pages=259–270|url=http://visiblelanguagejournal.com/issue/15|access-date=5 March 2017}} Times is similar to Plantin but "sharpened" or "modernised", with increased contrast (particularly resembling designs from the eighteenth and nineteenth century) and greater "sparkle".{{cite book|last1=Lawson|first1=Alexander|title=Anatomy of a Typeface|date=1990|publisher=David R. Godine|location=New York|isbn=9780879233334|pages=270–294|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FiJ87ixLs0sC&pg=PA270|access-date=6 March 2016}}{{cite web|last1=Morison|first1=Stanley|title=Changing the Times|url=http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/stanley-morison-changing-the-times|website=Eye|access-date=28 July 2015}}{{cite book|author=Allan Haley|title=Typographic Milestones|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=dKeVor1olhkC&pg=PA106|date=15 September 1992|publisher=John Wiley & Sons|isbn=978-0-471-28894-7|page=106}} Allan Haley commented that Times New Roman "looks like Plantin on a diet."{{cite book |last1=Haley |first1=Allen |title=ABC's of type |date=1990 |publisher=Watson-Guptill Publications |isbn=9780823000531 |page=[https://archive.org/details/abcsoftype0000hale/page/86 86] |url=https://archive.org/details/abcsoftype0000hale/page/86 }}

As the Plantin design is in the public domain, adaptations and unofficial digitisations (including simple knock-offs) have been released. Galaxie Copernicus by Chester Jenkins and Kris Sowersby is a reinterpretation of Plantin.{{cite web |last1=Heck |first1=Bethany |title=Galaxie Copernicus review |url=https://fontreviewjournal.com/galaxie-copernicus/ |website=Font Review Journal |date=11 August 2017 |access-date=13 September 2019}}{{cite web|title=Village: Galaxie Copernicus about|url=https://vllg.com/constellation/galaxie-copernicus/about|access-date=14 January 2022}} Sowersby followed it with a newspaper typeface, Tiempos, influenced by Times New Roman{{cite web |last1=Sowersby |first1=Kris |title=Tiempos Design Information |url=https://klim.co.nz/blog/tiempos-design-information/ |publisher=Klim Type Foundry |access-date=21 January 2019}}{{cite web |last1=Thomson |first1=Mark |last2=Sowersby |first2=Kris |title=Reputations: Kris Sowersby |url=http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/reputations-kris-sowersby |website=Eye |access-date=12 September 2019}} and later, in mid-2023, released a digital revival of the metal Plantin 110 cut itself—rather than a reinterpretation—called Martina Plantijn.{{cite web |last1=Sowersby |first1=Kris |title=Martina Plantijn Design Information |url=https://klim.co.nz/blog/martina-plantijn-design-information/ |publisher=Klim Type Foundry |access-date=29 December 2023}} Fabric Serif by Sindre Bremnes and Frode Helland of Monokrom Type Foundry is another reinterpretation.{{cite web|title=Fabric Serif in use - Fonts In Use|url=https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/143513/fabric-serif|access-date=14 January 2022}}{{cite web|title=Monokrom Skriftforlag|url=https://monokrom.no/fonts/fabricserif|access-date=14 January 2022}} Other similar designs include Musee by DSType{{cite web|title=Musee|url=https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/dstype/musee/|access-date=14 January 2022}} and Erato by Hoftype.{{cite web|title=Erato Font|url=https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/hoftype/erato/|access-date=14 January 2022}} In 2024 The Economist adopted a new typeface Economist Serif designed by Henrik Kubel and based on Plantin.{{Cite news |date=2024-02-07 |title=Why has The Economist changed its typeface? |url=https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2024/02/07/why-has-the-economist-changed-its-typeface |access-date=2024-03-24 |url-access=subscription |url-status=live |work=The Economist |issn=0013-0613 |archive-url=https://archive.today/20240725082822/https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2024/02/07/why-has-the-economist-changed-its-typeface |archive-date=2024-07-25}}

Aldine 721 is Bitstream's version of Plantin{{cite web|title=Aldine 721 in use|url=https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/218/aldine-721|access-date=14 January 2022}}{{cite web|title=Aldine 721 Font|url=https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/bitstream/aldine-721/|access-date=14 January 2022}} and Francisco Serial is a version by Softmaker.{{cite web|title=Francisco Serial Font|url=https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/softmaker/francisco-serial/|access-date=14 January 2022}}

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