page_title: Centaur (typeface)
section_title: Revival
hierarchical_section_title: Centaur (typeface) / Revival
caption_attribution_description: English: Centaur and its companion italic (then called Arrighi) in metal type.
context_page_description: Centaur is a serif typeface by book and typeface designer Bruce Rogers, based on the Renaissance-period printing of Nicolas Jenson around 1470. He used it for his design of the Oxford Lectern Bible. It was given widespread release by the British branch of Monotype, paired with an italic designed by calligrapher Frederic Warde and based on the slightly later work of calligrapher and printer Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi. The italic has sometimes been named separately as the "Arrighi" italic.
  Centaur is an elegant and quite slender design, lighter on the page than Jenson's work and most other revivals, an effect possibly amplified in the digital release compared to the metal type. It has been popular in fine book printing and is often used both for printing body text and especially titles and headings. One of its most notable uses has been in the designs of Penguin Books, who have regularly used it for titling.
context_section_description: Rogers' revival was originally drawn as titling capitals in 1914 for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rogers later expanded it, adding lower case, for his 1915 limited edition of Maurice de Guérin's The Centaur. 
  For the original release, matrices were cut by Robert Wiebking and the type was privately cast by American Type Founders. Some years later, the Monotype Corporation commissioned Rogers to release it for the general market. Rogers did not feel able to create a matching italic, and asked the calligrapher Frederic Warde if he could pair Centaur with a design Warde had created based upon Ludovico Arrighi’s 1520 chancery face, made in 1926 for the Officina Bodoni. Warde's design had the separate name Arrighi, which appears in some earlier specimens.
  The completed family was released for general use in 1929, with a first showing in Monotype's specimen booklet The Trained Printer and the Amateur by Alfred W. Pollard. Monotype described it as a 'long-descender type of great distinction', emphasising its feeling of not having been restricted to allow tighter linespacing, as other types often had been in the hot metal period. Monotype has sold the design with bold and bold italic designs (their invention, since bold type did not exist until much later), and swash italic alternate characters.
  Centaur shows some of the irregularities of early type compared to later designs. The dots of the i and j are very visibly shifted to the right, a feature of Jenson's original design. The horizontal stroke of the 'e' is slanted, not exactly horizontal as came to be the norm in print. On the other hand, while based on study of Jenson's work, Centaur is a deliberately loose imitation, more slender (especially in the serifs) than Jenson's original. It also modernises Jenson's two-way serifs on the top of the 'M' in favour of one-way serifs. In addition, the italic capitals slope in the modern tradition, which was established after Arrighi's time in the later 16th century. Monotype advisor and historian of printing Stanley Morison, who was influential in Monotype's series of revival designs of the 1920s and 30s, described Centaur in his book A Tally of Types as "a freehand emphasis of the calligraphic basis of the original" and its modernisation "a concession to contemporary sense". Sebastian Carter calls it "an imaginative recreation".
caption: Centaur & Arrighi identified separately on a metal type specimen book, at large print size
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