The Aldine roman

In February 1496 Aldus Manutius printed a short dialogue by the young Pietro Bembo about climbing Mount Etna. For it his punchcutter Francesco Griffo cut a new roman, lighter and more even than the Venetian romans before it. Almost every roman text face since, from Garamond to Times, descends from that alphabet. Source Library holds the Florentine copy; the type below was traced, letter by letter, from its pages.

Aldine Aetna: the facsimile

Each glyph is a real impression from the book, chosen as the most typical of its kind among some 70,000 printed letters on sixty pages of De Aetna and the Aldines of 1495–99 set in the same fount, then vectorised. Ink spread, worn corners and the slight unevenness of hand-set metal are kept on purpose, and the common letters carry three different impressions each, rotated as you read so that no two neighbouring sorts are the same cast, which is what a hand-set page actually looks like. This is what the 1496 reader saw.

In English

The type was cut for Latin, but here it is carrying every letter of the English alphabet, including the seven sorts that had to be reconstructed. Below, the same line twice: first with the three impressions of each common letter rotated as the compositor's case would have mixed them, then locked to a single impression per letter. That is the difference between a hand-set page and a typewriter.

Facsimile and revival

A revival is a designer's clean reinterpretation of a historical type; a facsimile reproduces the impressions themselves. Cardo, by David Perry, is an open-licence revival modelled on this same De Aetna roman, with complete Latin, Greek and Hebrew. The same sentence in both:

What the facsimile contains

Only what the 1496 text uses. The lowercase is complete for Latin as Aldus set it (u serves for v, long ſ inside words), with the ligatures ct ſt ſi ſſ fi ff, æ and the ampersand, and ę. The acute, grave and tilde (the tilde is the printer's nasal abbreviation, animũ for animum) are taken from real impressions and set over each vowel at the offset measured on the page, as the compositor did with separate accent sorts. Nineteen capitals, including a lone Q and the fused Qu sort Griffo cast for the common case. K comes from De Aetna itself (“Kalendis”); X, Y and Z from the Greek alphabet tables of Lascaris' grammar, where Aldus set the Greek majuscules from the roman case. The figures are old-style arabic numerals from the index of Perotti's Cornucopiae (1499), printed by the same shop, set in its smaller roman and scaled to this body, since the 1496 text itself counts only in roman numerals. J, U and W did not exist in 1490s roman type (I and V did their work), so those three are reconstructed and marked as such: W is VV, exactly as the compositors set it; U is the lowercase u raised to the cap line, as Monotype did for Bembo; J is the long s turned through 180° under the I's serif. The lowercase z is real (“ſyllogizari”); j, k, v and w are built the same way from the i, the l with the K's arms, and the V. Nothing else in the font is invented. Letter spacing is measured from the page too: one em is the book's line pitch, and sidebearings are half the median gap between neighbouring sorts.

The pipeline (binarise, segment, cluster by shape, label, trace, assemble) lives in the repository under scripts/fonts/aldine-aetna/ and can be re-run on other Aldine pages to extend the character set, or on any book in the library.

• AldineAetna-Regular.ttf · woff2 · public domain, CC0. Griffo cut these letters in 1496; we only traced them.
• Source: Pietro Bembo, De Aetna dialogus (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1496), Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, via Internet Archive.
• More of the press: the Aldine Press collection.