Gotico-Antiqua, proto-roman, hybrid, 15th-century types between gothic and roman. Conference papers & exhibition catalogue. Edited and designed by Jérôme Knebusch. Co-publication Atelier National de Recherche Typographique [ANRT]. Awarded by Most Beautiful German Books Shortlist 2021.

The book brings together researchers from the fields of typography, palaeography and incunabula studies, with a particular focus on type and letterforms. The relatively understudied period – after Gutenberg and before the consolidation of Jenson’s model – extends from the earliest traces of ‘humanistic’ tendencies to ‘pure’ roman type, including many cases of uncertain or experimental design, voluntary hybridisation and proto- or archaic roman. In 1459 in Mainz, Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer printed the Rationale Divinorum Officiorum by Guillaume Durand, using a typeface (now known as ‘Durandus’) that looked like no other before. From that point, we can follow a wide variety of developments, partly related to the travels of early printers from the Rhine area to Italy and France. By extension, the private press movement initiated by William Morris and Emery Walker at the end of the nineteenth century in England, revived some of those typefaces before they were once more largely forgotten.

Essays by Olivier Deloignon, Riccardo Olocco, Martina Meier, Nikolaus Weichselbaumer & Mathias Seuret, Dan Reynolds, Christopher Burke, Ferdinand Ulrich, Rafael Ribas & Alexis Faudot, Jérôme Knebusch. Foreword by Christelle Kirchstetter and Thomas Huot-Marchand. Exhibition part written by Jérôme Knebusch (curator).

496 pages
All texts in English & French
16 × 23,6 cm
Fredrigoni papers
Cloth hardcover
Hot foil embossing
Two colour screen-print on edges