Η ιστορική εξέλιξη των ελληνικών τυπογραφικών στοιχείων
Authors: Ματθιόπουλος Γεώργιος 
Published: February 2022

The present study of the continuous presence and evolution of the Greek alphabet within the history of printing attempts to compose a comprehensive overview of the personalities, historical events, aesthetic directions and technological parameters that shaped the morphology of Greek characters from Gutenberg’s invention until the end of the 20th century. At the same time, thorough research in books, magazines and newspapers, together with the presentation of unknown typographic specimens from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, allowed for the first time, the systematic collection and digitization of representative fonts of each different cultural milieu and technological stage. Thus, the trajectory of their presence and use in printed production can be clearly demarcated and presented as a historical and visual continuum.Within the European typographic production, the existence of Greek texts was very small, compared in quantitative terms to Latin and other languages. Nevertheless, Greek publications were addressed to a learned readership, who as a rule were the spiritual and cultural leaders of each local community and their familiarity with the Greek script was much greater, therefore, so was its influence. The basic 6 parameters of the study are:The time constraint:The study follows a chronological presentation from the invention of printing in combination with special periodization that results from the recording of the most important events in European history. My research and the narrative is concluded by the late 20th century, because the new digital reality henceforth introduced a different technological stage, resulting in economic and aesthetic realities that would require different analytical tools and references.The geographical limitations:In tandem with the chronological narrative, the research follows special historical developments in every major academic, urban and industrial centre of Europe that left its mark on the formation of the design aesthetic and technological innovations on the Greek types.Continuity and discontinuity of the aesthetic example:The aim of the research was to highlight the evolution and the significant paradigm changes of type design aesthetics, using as tools the developments of European society and art, as well as the publishing revolution after the 19th century.The technological parameter:The design and financial investment of Greek type production in the European foundries increased after many changes in engineering, chemistry and metallurgy that marked the industrial revolution in Europe and the USA. For this purpose, the technical processes which informed the design, engraving and casting of Greek types in each period are presented and analyzed.The visual parameter:The research uses several available bibliographic sources and historical archives to trace the path of history, whilst at the same time the importance of the visual memory of the past is also highlighted. The subject matter requires detailed references of the use of the various Greek alphabets of each period as their verbal description alone could not add significant knowledge of their evolution. Illustrations from engravings, sample pages of books, type specimen sheets, newspapers and machinery designs were used in order to capture the evolutionary course or the radical changes that played an important role.The narration of the historical, aesthetic and technological developments which shaped the design choices and the practical use of the Greek printing types are presented in four Chapters:The 1st Chapter discusses briefly the beginnings and historical development of the Greek script after the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet; its development of capital letters during the archaic period, the classical era and the Hellenistic times. It is followed by the description of the Byzantine scribal practice which led from majuscule to miniscule letterforms and ushered in the introduction of numerous ligatures, that enriched and complicated the form of the Byzantine texts.The 1st Chapter also includes the presentation and analysis of the traditional type-cutting stages, tools and procedures, the formation of the printing guilds, the formation and evolution of the various systems for type sizes and names, as well as the problems and solutions for the complex type-cutting and typesetting practices of Greek texts. Emphasis is also placed on the choices recorded for the evolution of Greek type design from the period of the incunabula up to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, when publishers and type-cutters abandoned the numerous Byzantine ligatures and their new designs followed the modulated stroke model established in European calligraphy.From the 2nd Chapter a chronological presentation begins, illustrating the first generation of Greek types. Starting in Renaissance Italy, where the first printed books with Greek texts appeared, the most important publishers-printers and engravers who defined the type forms are recorded. In 1486, the daring attempt of two Cretan clergymen, Laonicus and Alexander in Venice, to revive the Byzantine calligraphic standards, by cutting over a thousand different ligatures, opened the way for the possibilities of the printing method to use complex designs. Thus, in 1494 their example was followed by Aldus Manutius, the most successful scholar-printer of the Italian Renaissance. His herculean effort of publishing the first printed editions of all the ancient Greek literature with a group of dedicated Greek scholars impressed everyone in Europe and his choice to produce Greek fonts with numerous Byzantine ligatures established the typographic presence of the Byzantine scribal aesthetic in Greek texts. Zacharias Kalliergis, a talented and versatile Cretan scribe, emerged as one of the pioneers of Greek printed books and became a prolific typographer and printer. Both his early work in Venice and his later presence in Rome are impressive. A generation later, another Cretan, the scholar-calligrapher Angelos Vergikios was invited to Paris to organize the French king’s Greek library and to collaborate with the engraver Claude Garamont for a new Greek font to be used for the royal publishing programme. Indeed, that striking combination of unsurpassed Greek lettering and type-cutting that came to be known as the Grecs du roi types was used by the tireless publishers Robert and Henri Estienne for their unparalleled Greek editions. They established the Grecs du roi as the ultimate standard for printers and publishers to follow throughout Europe for two centuries. The growing presence and prestige of the ancient Greek literature and the patristic texts in the curricula of European universities gave impetus to Greek typographic production and the best publishers and printers were often judged by the quality of their Greek editions. Well-known publishing houses, such as Plantin, Enschedé, Elsevir, Oxford and Cambridge, etc. published exceptional volumes that raised the bar of publishing quality for Greek books. During the long period that Greece was enslaved under the Ottoman Empire, the constant presence of the Greek language in the dynamically evolving cultural developments in Europe eventually led to important changes in the design of Greek letters. These changes came from the Western-European calligraphic practice, which marked, in essence, the departure of Greek writing from the Byzantine aesthetic that had been incorporated in the printing practice during the first three centuries of printed production. The purge of the numerous ligatures in the middle of the 18th century was a decisive factor for the easier and cheaper production of Greek books, and it allowed the easier teaching of ancient Greek literature in European secondary and university education. At the same time, nonetheless, the new Greek script played an invisible but beneficial factor in the preparation of the generation that organized and led the Greek Revolution, facilitating with its simplicity the rapid exit of the modern Greek nation state from its medieval stagnation that existed for centuries under the Turks.The 3rd Chapter includes the multifaceted developments of the 19th century. The “paradigm shift” is presented, which emphatically determined the new course of Greek types for the coming centuries. By imposing the Latin type design forms on the Greek alphabet, the most prominent typographers-publishers of the neoclassical aesthetic, the Italian Giambattista Bodoni, the French Firmin Didot and the German Karl Tauchnitz, established a rounded form for each letter. The change of the Greek type paradigm in England is also notable; the adoption of the writing hand of the great philologist Richard Porson as a model of a new Greek font quickly prevailed in all Greek editions of the empire and in the USA, but it had minimal use in Greece. The unprecedented development of the industrial society throughout the 19th century brought a great boost to the publishing sector and the development of public education significantly increased the teaching of ancient Greek literature for both the secondary and higher education in Western Europe. In Greece, the success of the national liberation struggle resulted in the creation of the first Greek state without, however, any technological capabilities, which led to the complete dependence of the Greek economy in general and the printing and publishing sector in particular on European industrial technology. After the Greek Revolution and until the end of the 19th century, the first attempts were recorded to establish factories by energetic printers, such as Konstantinos Garpolas, Konstantinos Miliadis and Andreas Koromilas or entrepreneurs-publishers like Anestis Konstantinidis, Nicolaos Kargadouris, Karl Meissner etc. Finally, the 3rd Chapter concludes with a presentation and analysis of the revolutionary technological changes in the engineering, casting and typesetting of texts that took place in Europe and the USA after the rapid development of printing technology and the profound socio-economic changes created by the explosive capital and commercial expansion along with the equally impressive expansion of newspaper publishing in almost all social strata in every nation.The 4th and final Chapter focuses on the developments of the 20th century, when a complex period was formed, full of events and contradictory in choices. The discussion includes the study and mapping of the industrial concentration in the field of typecasting and typesetting during the accelerated development of the industrial sector in Greece in the interwar and postwar years. The world domination by two principal typesetting systems, i.e. Linotype and Monotype, laid the foundations for an impressive development of print media for most of the 20th century and inevitably played an important role in the choices and aesthetics of Greek font production. From the beginning of the century, the first Greek type foundries were companies of entrepreneurs who imported the necessary machinery and Greek type matrices from European foundries, and were trying to compete by charging lower prices and offering faster service. We observe the development of two competing companies: V. Karydis - A. Karotsis and Em. Karpathakis - Anagnostopoulos, the collection of which was growing in variety, especially in the decorative capital letters series. In the first decades, the collection of Greek fonts of the American typesetting companies, Linotype and Lanston Monotype, included only variations of the traditional typefaces of the 19th century. In contrast, the English Monotype Corporation introduced the revival of a renaissance Greek series selected by the British Library librarian, Victor Scholderer; it was called New Hellenic, and challenged the supremacy of the Porson Greek in ancient Greek editions. At the same period, Stanley Morison’s typographic program for renewing Monotype’s Latin collection allowed the unconventional ideas of Eric Gill and Jan Van Krimpen to design the Greek version of their Latin fonts, Perpetua and Romulus, respectively, with fully simulated Greek lowercase letters.In Greece after World War II, the destruction of rural production, the lack of investment for agricultural equipment and the deep political scars left behind by the civil conflict led to an unprecedented increase in the population of a few cities. The austere economic conditions gave impetus to the publishing industry that offered cheap information and entertainment, while, at the same time, allowed the fast growth of advertising to the concentrated population. The two post-war type foundries that dominated the period between 1960-1980 were by Theodoros Paraskevopoulos (“PAP”) and by Ioannis Sarasitis (“Victoria”). In addition to the traditional font series they both claimed the primacy of the Greek market with the production of many decorative fonts, until the global shift from hot-metal type to photocomposition technology led to the inevitable end of all traditional typographic art.During the same period, however, the new international sales initiative of the British Monotype company brought the production of two more Greek typefaces: Greek Gill Sans and Greek Times. The great success of Gill Sans and Times New Roman in the 1930s made them ideal ambassadors for the company’s new policy. Converting into Greek Gill’s modern sans serif design had few problems to deal with, but the Times’ classic Renaissance design required its adaptation to a modern look as well as to more traditional references. From the 1950s onwards, the new photocomposition method of text production began to emerge at an accelerating rate; the technical development of which is outlined for a better understanding of the challenges faced by the oligopoly of the three “dinosaurs” of the industry: Linotype, Intertype and Monotype. The rapid development of photo-electronic technology and lithographic printing led to the abandonment of the hot-metal printing that had dominated the publishing sector since the Gutenberg era. Photocomposition of the text and lithographic printing offered great economic benefits that quickly prevailed worldwide. Linotype, Intertype and Monotype tried desperately to modernize their technology base and turn their obsolete machines into phototypesetters, but eventually the unceasing competition from many small and flexible companies led to their downfall in the 1980s.The impressive publishing development during the post-war period in Greece and at the same time the rapid technological change led to the sudden decommissioning of the older generations of experienced typesetters and technicians of traditional hot-metal printing, who were replaced mostly by unskilled typists with minimal experience of typographic aesthetics. Linotype Co. had tried to win the Greek phototypesetting market by offering new Hellenized fonts such as Helvetica, Optima, Century Schoolbook and Baskerville. However, new and dynamic companies introduced phototypesetting machines and took over a large part of the sector leading to the decline of most small printing establishments. The quick transfer from the local artisan-printers or monotype operators, whose knowledge was gained after many years of experience, to the recruitment of inexperienced typists for the cheap and rapid production of text had an inevitable negative impact on the aesthetics of the publishing sector in Greece, but the speed of change left no room for any critical reflection at the time. Phototypesetting companies multiplied and developed at an impressive rate from the mid-1970s to the end of the century and their type libraries relied mainly on the traditional font series and many “Hellenized” Latin typefaces were imported from the foreign manufacturers that provided their typesetting equipment. This situation remained unchanged until the introduction of the new digital technology, which ushered in another revolution in visual communication.