Case Study
Words by Production Type Team
Vendôme Nouveau, chapter two: Death by Scan
Vendôme Nouveau: a four-chapter series on the life, death, and resurrection of a French typefaces. In the first chapter, Vendôme rose to become a face of modern France, loved enough to be copied endlessly the length of the century. In this second chapter, the environment that made it a phenomenon changes around it: metal gives way to phototype and pixels, and Vendôme is copied until no two versions are the same.
Vendôme Nouveau: a four-chapter series on the life, death, and resurrection of a French typefaces. In the first chapter, Vendôme rose to become a face of modern France, loved enough to be copied endlessly the length of the century. In this second chapter, the environment that made it a phenomenon changes around it: metal gives way to phototype and pixels, and Vendôme is copied until no two versions are the same.
Time doesn’t stand still, the world that made Vendôme a phenomenon changes around it. And it really doesn’t help that metal is on its way out. Roger Excoffon and the Olive Foundry describes the end of the foundry: Once Marcel Olive, the head of the foundry retires, Olive closes its doors completely in 1978. Its typefaces and equipment get sold to the Haas foundry and shipped out of Marseille.
This, as you might have already predicted, is not the end for Vendôme. It keeps getting copied, lovingly, by hand, everywhere in France. But as typography moves into phototypesetting and then onto screens, Vendôme gets remade, copied again and again, by foundries and service providers racing to carry classics into new technology. Below are some of the earlier examples.
In 1979, the German foundry Berthold sets about making its own Vendôme, and fortunately for us all, the proofs survive — sheet after sheet of alphabet, flish with handwritten collections of Berthold’s artistic director Günter Gerhard Lange. We can see in the proofs that he wants the letters sharper, with a “certain aggressiveness,” and the striking character of the original. Even so, type historian and researcher Dan Reynolds argues that Lange essentially made his own Vendôme, as he “never entirely felt bound to a typeface’s original design, but edited them as he saw fit.”
But for every Lange agonizing over Vendôme’s dancing serifs, there are many others trying to get Vendôme onto the machine and out the door. As one technology gives way to the next, like hot metal to phototype to digital, the tedious work of converting thousands of typefaces gets farmed out to service providers such as URW, Scangraphic, and Elsner+Flake, LinoType, and even , once Fonderie Olive’s biggest rival (who, interestingly, have one of the most expansive digitizations of Vendôme compared to others). They work at an industrial scale, through whole libraries, Vendôme is just one more name on their very long lists.
Early technologies like Ikarus don’t produce a letter with the smooth curves a designer would use today: they trace its outline as a long string of fixed coordinate points, dot after dot after dot. Speedy and good for volume, subtlety isn’t Ikarus’ forte. Vendôme’s sharp serifs, its rhythm, deep lines are characteristics that it tends to round off and average out. Some might call that by another word: loss.
By the late 1990s, many Vendômes exist and no two are the same. Some less careful than others, most are translations of translations. It falls further and further away into the abyss of degraded hard drives, Vendôme stays dormant for a while.
Up next: Production Type designers inherit fragments of Vendôme Nouveau and get to work, but it’s not easy when every quirk becomes a decision.
