Egelnoff-Berner foundry, type specimen, Frankfurt, 1592.

Jacques (or Jacob) Sabon, born in Lyon around 1520, was one of the first typographers to specialize in type foundry. Working for the Egenolff foundry in Frankfurt from 1557, his presence in the city —which was to become the capital of European typography— was probably due to economic as well as religious reasons. Sabon, a reformer, found refuge in Frankfurt, as did André Wechel, Garamont's printer and executor. Called to Antwerp by Christophe Plantin in 1565, Sabon completed the engraving of Garamont's unfinished alphabet of "large extraordinary capitals", according to Plantin's archives. In 1571, he married Judith Egenolff and, the following year, took over management of the foundry. He was well supplied with French cast iron from Garamont, Haultin and Granjon. It is possible that André Wechel supplied him with a large proportion of them, since, as Guillaume Le Bé I states in his Memorandum, when selling the Garamond equipment: "André Wechel bought the poinsons, which he transported to Germany...". After Sabon's death in 1580, his widow married Conrad Berner, who in 1592 published one of the first specimen typefaces for a wide range of printers. Until then, type foundries had offered proofs on a limited commercial basis. This specimen, as his commentary points out, is allocated to typographers to facilitate "the choice of the typeface with which their work will be best carried out". The roman typefaces shown are called Garamond, and the italics are attributed to Granjon. The whole is very close to the typefaces owned by Plantin's printing house. The Garamont name thus became synonymous with a label of excellence rather than with exact fidelity to original, ill-defined types. In the 1960s, Jan Tschichold used the Egenolff-Berner specimen as the basis for a new garalde, which he named "Sabon" in homage to his distant predecessor.