Culture
Words by Michel Wlassikoff
Deberny et Peignot’s “Astrée”
Met with mixed reception, Astrée and Naudin followed the Peignot and Deberny foundry merger. They contrasted with the typographical culture and curiosity of the time.
Met with mixed reception, Astrée and Naudin followed the Peignot and Deberny foundry merger. They contrasted with the typographical culture and curiosity of the time.
On the occasion of the merger of the two foundries Peignot and Deberny, Charles Peignot put on the market Naudin and Astrée, types of work whose design began before the war in the Cochin lineage, but which had a mixed reception. Astrée had been designed before 1914, by Robert Girard, then director of Deberny, but it was Charles Peignot who named it after 1922. He commented on his choice in these terms: ”If Astrée is not the restitution of an ancient type, it is all the same of classical influence. It is a creation which is more on the side of Garamond than of the types of the 18th century, and I would even say that it is earlier in inspiration. We think of the Venetian characters, drier, that’s why I named it Astrée…”
In truth, this typeface did not satisfy the rather innovative taste of Charles Peignot, as he points out in retrospect: “… both for Naudin and for Astrée, there existed then in the world of printing and in that of publishing an almost total absence of typographical culture and curiosity; and these two faces made modest careers, not that they were bad, but they went against the grain of the times.”
Charles Peignot, “Les Peignot, George et Charles”, Communication et langages, nº59, 1er trimestre 1984. Pp. 61-85.
Deberny and Peignot completed the font by publishing ”Initiales Astrée Noires” during the 1930s.
