Vendôme Nouveau, chapter one: the Life of Vendôme

France is rebuilding after WWII. The economy begins to climb back up, the presses get busier and busier, and publishing and advertising are in the middle of a loud, confident, creative decade full of new ideas. In type, a particular French appetite shows itself not so much for the cool, rational letters coming out of Switzerland and Germany, but warm, personable, expressive characters. In Marseille, at the Fonderie Olive, art director Roger Excoffon is drawing exactly those.

At this point in time, Fonderie Olive has titling typefaces, advertising typefaces, display typefaces. But it doesn’t yet have a text typeface of its own. Through the open door, in 1950, Vendôme comes into the world.

Drawn by sculptor and set designer François Ganeau under the rigorous art direction of Roger Excoffon, Vendôme seeks to take the old French serif — the sharp, spiky letters that had set signs and titles for generations — and make it contemporary without becoming a caricature. The stems lean where they ought to stand straight, the serifs come to points abruptly. The thin strokes waver so that the eye never settles. Between Ganeau and Excoffon’s hands, Vendôme comes alive, dances on the page.

Fonderie Olive mounts a lavish stand at the Salon in Paris, prints an extravagant brochure, and markets Vendôme hard. With five specimens and some twenty press advertisements, the slogan repeats until it sticks: “Le Vendôme vend.”

And sell it does. Within two years it comes in twelve sizes from 6 to 60, and as the family keeps branching into bold, black, condensed, printers start taking to it as well. Vendôme spreads over book jackets, records sleeves, film posters, travel advertisements, becoming a face of modern French graphic design.

Love is a strange thing, though. Vendôme lives only in metal, and metal can only go so big. But France wants Vendôme bigger, three feet tall over the café awning on the street. There’s no Vendôme to set to that size, so people make their own. Across the country, sign painters and shopkeepers redraw Vendôme by hand, approximating its tilt, its triangular serifs, its plunging V. They leave behind a rich trail of near-Vendômes. Some of these are astonishingly faithful, others only think they’re Vendôme.

A typeface has to matter enormously for people to start copying it by hand at this scale: Vendôme is copied not only because it sells, but also because Vendôme is loved. Its hand-painted ghosts still watch the streets, outliving the metal that inspired them. But its twenty years in the spotlight don’t last forever.