Gotico-Antiqua, proto-roman, hybrid, 15th-century types between gothic and roman. Conference papers & exhibition catalogue. Edited and designed by Jérôme Knebusch. Co-publication Poem & Atelier National de Recherche Typographique [ANRT].

The bilingual publication (English and French) brings together researchers from the fields of typography, palaeography and incunabula studies, with a particular focus on type and letterforms. The relatively understudied period – after Gutenberg and before the consolidation of Jenson’s model – extends from the earliest traces of ‘humanistic’ tendencies to ‘pure’ roman type, including many cases of uncertain or experimental design, voluntary hybridisation and proto- or archaic roman. In 1459 in Mainz, Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer printed the Rationale Divinorum Officiorum by Guillaume Durand, using a typeface (now known as ‘Durandus’) that looked like no other before. From that point, we can follow a wide variety of developments, partly related to the travels of early printers from the Rhine area to Italy and France. By extension, the private press movement initiated by William Morris and Emery Walker at the end of the nineteenth century in England, revived some of those typefaces before they were once more largely forgotten.

Essays by Olivier Deloignon, Riccardo Olocco, Martina Meier, Nikolaus Weichselbaumer & Mathias Seuret, Dan Reynolds, Christopher Burke, Ferdinand Ulrich, Rafael Ribas & Alexis Faudot, Jérôme Knebusch. Foreword by Christelle Kirchstetter and Thomas Huot-Marchand.

The primary fonts used for typesetting the book are Almost Roman and Almost Gothic. Almost is complemented by Adobe Jenson, Alte Schwabacher, DTL Flamande, Jenson Rotunda (not pictured here). The book additionally showcases all 16 digital fonts (15 typefaces and one set of initials) made as part of ANRT’s Gotico-Antiqua project, produced by Rafael Ribas and Alexis Faudot and released in 2019 under the SIL Open Font License. Finally, the book has images of many other related typefaces which are discussed in the essays. These include Unger-Fraktur, Centralschrift, Morris Troy, ITC Golden Type, or Fanfare, to name but a few.

More information on the website of Poem editions

Spread with glyph sets of the 15 digital Gotico-Antiqua revivals. Not shown here are the Zainer Initials.