Claude Garamond

Claude Garamond (ca. 1480 – 1561) was a Parisian publisher. He was one of the leading type designers of his time, and is credited with the introduction of the apostrophe, the accent and the cedilla to the French language. Several contemporary typefaces, including those currently known as Garamond, Granjon, and Sabon, reflect his influence. Garamond was an apprentice of Simon de Colines; later, he was an assistant to Geoffroy Tory, whose interests in humanist typography and the ancient Greek capital letterforms, or majuscules, may have informed Garamond's later work.

Garamond came to prominence in 1541, when three of his Greek typefaces (e.g. the Grecs du roi (1541)) were requested for a royally-ordered book series by Robert Estienne. Garamond based these types on the handwriting of Angelo Vergecio, the King's Librarian at Fontainebleau, as well as that of his ten-year-old pupil, Henri Estienne. According to Arthur Tilley, the resulting books are "among the most finished specimens of typography that exist." Shortly thereafter, Garamond created the Roman types for which he would most be remembered, and his influence spread rapidly throughout and beyond France during the 1540s.

Garamond's name was originally rendered as "Garamont", but following the standardization of French spelling, the terminal 'd' became customary and stuck.

In 1621, sixty years after Garamond's death, the French printer Jean Jannon (1580–1635) created a type specimen with very similar...
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