Bodoni

May 19, 2015

I have always had a great admiration for Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813), the famous engraver of typefaces, typographer and printer who between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made famous once again the Italian art of printing at the court of the Dukes of Parma. The Bodoni typeface is among the most classic and celebrated in the history of typography, and with good reason. According to the same Bodoni, the beauty of a typeface is the result of four principles: uniformity of design, sharpness and neatness, good taste, and charm. In my opinion, the almost universal validity of these principles makes of the Bodonian work a unsurpassed standard in typeface design.

Some time ago, in a library in the capital of Costa Rica, I found a beautiful German edition of the legendary "Manual of Typography” by Giambattista Bodoni, a work to which the typographer and artist had worked for four decades and that was finally published posthumously by his wife, in two volumes, in 1818. Gathering them into a single quarto volume of more than 1200 pages, with 142 sets of roman and italic typefaces, as well as a wide selection of decorative frames, ornaments, symbols and flowers, as well as Greek, Hebrew, Russian, Phoenician, Armenian, Coptic, and Tibetan alphabets, the extraordinary volume was proposed at a fair price of 90 dollars (books in Costa Rica cost more than in the “first world”). Too much for me.

Some time later, in the same library, I found the book offered at half price, but again the stinginess won me. With the same money, I thought, you can buy one of those beautiful Lamy Al Star in Copper Orange, the glorious 2015 edition of the famous German pen, to be fitted with an italic 1.1. or 1.5 nib…

In short, the wait has been rewarded this Sunday, when among the books of a stand in a local mall I found the great Bodonian work offered at 18 dollars, to be discounted to 50%! Although I was cycling, I loaded on the handlebars the 4 kilograms of book, and I run happily at home!

About the book, there is nothing relevant to say. It is accurate, well printed and well bound, in red editorial cloth. The characters are printed in their different sizes and slight stylistic variations, one per page and only on the front of the paper, with the upper case and Italic alphabets in separate sets.

The typefaces are beautiful. The set of numbers superb. Ornaments and decorative borders are extraordinary and give immediately want to copy them.

I'm really happy to have at home the magnum opus of the great Bodoni, his eternal typographic manual.

The pens in the photographs that follow are not just a small sign of coquetry, but serve to give an idea of the considerable size of the book.