Tag: typographic firsts
For more than a thousand years the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs was completely lost. For centuries, many assumed that they were magical symbols that might never be understood by mere mortals. The breakthrough only came with the discovery of a 2,200-year-old black basalt slab. But what does that have to do with typography, dragons and unicorns? Read on to find out. News has been around as long as humans have. From word of mouth to handwritten newsletters to printed newspapers in the early 1600s, the news has always captivated us. It has evolved from an expensive and bespoke service for an elite few into a major part of today’s mass media. The modern poster first appeared in France in the 19th century, but its antecedents can be found in Renaissance printmaking. Woodcut, engraving, etching, and drypoint were techniques used by the likes of Albrecht Dürer, Hieronymus Bosch, and Raphael, while printmaking publishers, like Hieronymus Cock, helped popularize the standalone art print and turn it into a thriving industry. The remarkable story of early African American print culture; its authors, editors, journalists, printers, and publishers. From protest pamphlets to the first Black newspapers, periodicals and books. From around the beginning of the 1600s, there was a renewed interest in calligraphy. At the same time, women, known as writing mistresses, begin to teach handwriting and calligraphy to young women. Maria Strick in the Netherlands and Marie Pavie, perhaps from France, are the first two women to have their calligraphy copybooks published in print. Robert Granjon (1513–90) was a French type designer who, in 1557, invented a new style of typeface which later came to be know as Civilité, after the civilité or etiquette books which the typeface often appeared in. Although Granjon wished for his Civilité to become the national typeface of France, it never really caught on, and it never seriously competed with Roman and Italic fonts. On a cold morning in early autumn of 1536, in a small town on the outskirts of Brussels, William Tyndale was led from a tiny prison cell, then chained to a stake, strangled and burned. His crime? Daring to challenge the Catholic Church and his insistence on translating the Bible into English. Tyndale’s translation was […] The Black Death of the fourteenth century, a disease named after the symptomatic boils and darkened skin caused by internal bleeding, claimed as many as 200 million lives. Even by the fifteenth century, when populations were just beginning to recover, outbreaks of the same plague were still regularly reoccurring throughout Europe. The pointed finger must surely be one of the oldest human gestures. In deep prehistory, long before the evolution of spoken language, and when we were considerably hairier, it is not difficult to imagine one of our primitive human ancestors pointing to a lion, a landmark, or a lemon. Printing was introduced into the Americas by the Italian Giovanni Paoli, better known as Juan Pablos. The first book issued from his press in Mexico City was Doctrina breve, a Spanish handbook of Christian doctrine, written by Juan de Zumárraga, Mexico’s first bishop, and printed in 1539 — making it the Western Hemisphere’s first printed […]
Dragons & Unicorns
December 12, 2020
Who invented the newspaper?
September 28, 2020
Inventing Posters
July 31, 2020
Black Print
July 11, 2020
The Writing Mistress
June 18, 2020
Death of a Typeface
June 6, 2020
The Most Dangerous Book in the World
April 20, 2020
Printed Pandemic: Plague Books
March 19, 2020
Point, don’t point
January 27, 2020
The Oldest Book in America
January 13, 2020
