![]() Morison was influential in a number of areas of typography, pioneering the creation of a large number of typefaces for Monotype. He also consulted for the London Times newspaper, creating the typeface Times New Roman® in a successful effort to improve the paper’s readability. Morison, a well-respected English typographer, was a typographic consultant to the Monotype Corporation. Morison’s Bembo design was released for typesetting in 1929, whose redesign was the result of adapting the Bembo typeface to the machine composition and typesetting requirements of the day. Notably, the ascenders of the lowercase lettering are taller than the uppercase also the c is slanted forwards and there is a returned curve on the final stem of the m, n and h. The calligraphic style that the serifs pronounce imparts a warm human feel to the typeface. In fact, the characteristics of many other well known typefaces such as Garamond® and Times® Roman can be traced back to the Bembo typeface. The resulting typeface which was a departure from the common pen-drawn calligraphy of the day, and looked more similar to the style of the roman typefaces we are familiar with today. In the case of the Bembo typeface, Griffo could not have known how important in the history of typeface design his new cut would be. A punchcutter was a very skilled job and the their interpretation of a typeface design would be what was eventually printed typeface designers had little input into the punchcutter’s work once their design had passed out of their hands. The Bembo typeface was cut by Francesco Griffo, a Venetian goldsmith who had become a punchcutter and worked for revered printer Aldus Manutius.īeing a punchcutter meant that Griffo spent his days punching out the shape of a typeface into steel. The typeface originally used to publish Pietro Bembo’s book “De Aetna”, a book about Bembo’s visit to Mount Etna. The Bembo design was named after notable the Venetian poet, Cardinal and literary theorist of the 16th century Pietro Bembo. The original Morison typeface contained only four weights and no italics. The Corporation gave it to the Library in 1967.The Bembo® design is an old-style humanist serif typeface originally cut by Francesco Griffo in 1495 and revived by Stanley Morison in 1929. The Library copy has a direct connection with Morison, having been purchased by him in April 1940 and donated a few years later to the Monotype Corporation. These founts (Aldus’s fourth tondo) inspired the famous Bembo founts designed in 1928 by the distinguished English typographer Stanley Morison (1889–1967). The book was printed with new tondo founts commissioned by Aldus specifically for this edition from the Bolognese punch-cutter Francesco Griffo (d. Leaf D2 verso shows Bembo’s additions of “Plinius et Strabo / meminere” in the margin of lines 5 and 6 in substitution of “meminit Strabo”, crossed away, and of “illorum” for “illius” on line 7, both additions matching textual variants introduced in the 1530 edition. In addition, they were all included by Bembo in the second revised edition of his text published in 1530. ![]() The copy here shows authorial variants, corrections and additions to the text: their hand matches Pietro’s in two fifteenth-century manuscripts of Horace’s Carmina originally in his father’s library and now in Cambridge libraries (CUL MS Dd.15.13 and King’s College 34, also both in this online exhibition). ![]() Pietro’s first Latin work, De Aetna, was also the first Latin literary text published by Aldus. A well-known humanist, Pietro collaborated with Aldus as an editor he also played a pivotal role in many Aldine editions of classical and humanistic Greek, Latin and vernacular texts by providing ancient or authoritative manuscript exemplars. Aldus was in close contact with the learned Venetian patrician and diplomat Bernardo Bembo (1433–1519) and his son Pietro.
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