page_title: Garamond
section_title: Jean Jannon
hierarchical_section_title: Garamond / History / Jean Jannon
caption_attribution_description: English: Matrices from Jean Jannon's punches, sometimes called the 'Romain de l'Université' (which according to Mosley may be a modern name; de l'Université meaning traditional metal types in eighteenth-century French printing). Français&#160;: Matrice originales du Romain de l'Université de Jean Jannon. Exposition Le Livre à la Renaissance, exposition des trésors de l'Imprimerie Nationale et de ses savoir-faire, pour Le Livre sur la Place de Nancy 2013.
context_page_description: Garamond is a group of many serif typefaces, named for sixteenth-century Parisian engraver Claude Garamond, generally spelled as Garamont in his lifetime). Garamond-style typefaces are popular and particularly often used for book printing and body text.
  Garamond's types followed the model of an influential typeface cut for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius by his punchcutter Francesco Griffo in 1495, and are in what is now called the old-style of serif letter design, letters with a relatively organic structure resembling handwriting with a pen, but with a slightly more structured, upright design.
  Following an eclipse in popularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, many modern revival faces in the Garamond style have been developed. It is common to pair these with italics based on those created by his contemporary Robert Granjon, who was well known for his proficiency in this genre.
context_section_description: In 1621, sixty years after Garamond's death, the French printer Jean Jannon released a specimen of typefaces that had some characteristics similar to the Garamond designs. The French Royal Printing Office (Imprimerie Royale) appears to have bought matrices from him in 1641 in three large sizes, roman and italic at roughly 18, 24 and 36 point sizes. (The contract is actually made for one 'Nicholas Jannon', which historians have concluded to be a mistake.) Despite the purchase, it is not clear that the office ever much used Jannon's type: historian James Mosley has reported being unable to find books printed by the Imprimerie that use more than two sizes of italic. His type would later be misattributed to Garamond. Jannon wrote in his specimen that:
  Seeing that for some time many persons have had to do with the art [of printing] who have greatly lowered it ... the desire came upon me to try if I might imitate, after some fashion, some one among those who honourably busied themselves with the art, [men whose deaths] I hear regretted every day [Jannon mentions some eminent printers of the previous century] ... and inasmuch as I could not accomplish this design for lack of types which I needed ... [some typefounders] would not, and others could not furnish me with what I lacked [so] I resolved, about six years ago, to turn my hand in good earnest to the making of punches, matrices and moulds for all sorts of characters, for the accommodation both of the public and of myself.
  Jannon's career took place during a politically tense period. Jannon was a Protestant in mostly Catholic France. After apparently working with the Estienne family in Paris he set up an independent career as printer in Sedan in what is now north-eastern France, becoming printer for the Protestant Academy. By his report he took up punchcutting seriously in his thirties, although according to Williamson he would have cut decorative material and engravings at least before this. Sedan the time enjoyed an unstable independence as a principality at a time when the French government had conceded through the Edict of Nantes to allowing a complicated system of restricted liberties for Protestants. While acknowledging his talent and commissioning equipment from him, as documented by the surviving purchase order, it is known that authorities in 1644 raided an office in Caen where he had been commissioned to do printing. Warde initially assumed that this was the source of the Jannon materials in the Imprimerie Nationale before the government's purchase order came to light. Jannon's types and their descendants are recognizable by the triangular serifs on the top left of such characters as 'm', 'n' and 'r', which have a very steep slant in Jannon's design compared to Garamond's. The italics are also very different to Garamond's own or Granjon's, being much more ornate and with considerable variation in angle of the capitals. Opinions of Jannon's engraving quality have varied; Warde found them "of slight value as a book face" (the surviving Jannon sizes were intended as display faces, cut at 18pt or larger) and Vervliet described them as "famous not so much for the quality of the design but as for the long-term confusion it created", although many reproductions of his work were successful in printing in the twentieth century. Jannon cut far more types than those surviving in the Imprimerie collection: before the misattribution to Garamond, he was particularly respected for his engraving of an extremely small size of type, known for his workplace as sédanoise, which was popular.
  By the nineteenth century, Jannon's matrices had come to be known as the Caractères de l'Université (Characters of the University). It has sometimes been claimed that this term was an official name designated for the Jannon type by Cardinal Richelieu, while Warde in 1926 more plausibly suggested it might be a garbled recollection of Jannon's work with the Sedan Academy, which operated much like a university despite not using the name. Carter in the 1970s followed this conclusion. Mosley, however, 
caption: The matrices of Jannon's Imprimerie nationale type.
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