![]() ![]() Jean Midolle and the various Midolline typefacesĪlix Christie’s novel Gutenberg’s Apprentice presents Peter Schöffer as the designer of the type used in the Gutenberg Bible. Wherever possible, I have just directly linked to online editions of books, articles, or other items instead. I have also included a basic transcript of my presentation, with only minimal footnotes. The ATypI published a video of the presentation after the conference, embedded below. With this presentation, I hope to encourage researchers to uncover more details of his work there. Among other places, his career took him to Belfort, Geneva, and Strasbourg before his trail went cold in Belgium, where he may have died. Jean Midolle was born in or near Besançon in Revolutionary France. Petersburg in Russia, from Edinburgh and Oslo in the north to Vienna in the south. I shall also address the Midolline phenomenon, by which nine loosely related type designs were distributed across dozens of foundries in the western world during the second half of the nineteenth century, from St. This presentation explains how Haenel’s Midolline typeface quickly inspired a new category of nineteenth-century type classification and became a term that printers briefly used as shorthand for all roman/blackletter hybrids. By this definition, Jean Midolle might be Germany’s first type designer, although he was almost certainly unaware that Eduard Haenel’s typefoundry in Berlin used a page from a pattern book of his as a design source. They may not have even understood the process behind those products’ manufacture. German design historians define nineteenth-century designers as people who created drawings determining new products’ appearances but were not involved in their production. These originated in Germany during the nineteenth century. Back to the original post: An introduction to Midollineįor the 2018 ATypI conference in Antwerp, I made a 20-minute presentation about the various Midolline typefaces. I highly recommend that you check the Gotico-Antiqua book out. The Midolline typefaces described below are just one kind of blackletter–roman hybrid produced between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. 4 March 2021 update: About the Gotico-Antiqua bookĪn extended version of this post, encompassing additional research and more imagery, was recently published in English and French as part of the book Gotico-Antiqua, proto-roman, hybrid, 15th-century types between gothic and roman. That book is an excellent introduction to the middle ground between two common typographic categories. Printed in Strasbourg by Simon Fils, 1834–35. From the Spécimen des écritures modernes. ![]() Midolline: How a Frenchman became Germany’s first type designerĬlose-up of plate 12 (Midolline), by Jean Midolle.
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