![]() ![]() To this day, italic fonts are known in Spanish as letra grifa after Griffo. It’s thought he was hanged for his crime, a strange end to one of the most influential type designers of all time. The last notice we have of him is in 1516, when he is charged with beating his son-in-law to death with an iron bar. Just as Aldus Manutius was about to achieve a government-authorized monopoly on the printing of Greek literature, he and Griffo had a falling out. Posterity has come to regard the Bembo type as Aldus’s and Griffo’s masterpiece.” -Allan Haley, Typographic Milestones So famous did it become that it influenced typeface design for generations. The type used for the text became instantly popular. “In February 1496, Aldus published a rather insignificant essay by the Italian scholar Pietro Bembo. Then Aldus decided he needed a new typeface that he would use first to publish an essay titled De Aetna by the famed scholar Pietro Bembo. If you recognize Aldus’ name, it may be because the company that created Pagemaker, the first widely used layout software, and that spurred the whole desktop publishing revolution, was named Aldus, and used his image as their logo.įor the design of his italic Aldus turned to Francesco Griffo, who made the molds in which the type would be cast. He invented pocket editions of books with soft covers that were affordable for a wide range of readers, organized the scheme of book design, normalized the use of punctuation, and used the first italic type. ![]() Aldus’s sign also included the latin phrase Festina lente, or “hasten slowly.”Īldus was an entrepreneur and an innovator, and soon became the most prolific publisher and printer in Renaissance Italy. ![]() This same symbol, by the way, was used for many years as a logo by Doubleday Books. Aldus took as his symbol the image of a dolphin around an anchor, which is derived from the ancient symbol for Beirut, Lebanon. The art of the printed book spread quickly for the times, moving from the innovations of Gutenberg around 1450 near Mainz, Germany, to other cities in Europe.Īldus Manutius, a humanist himself, set up his Aldine Press in Venice around 1490. ![]()
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