Culture
Words by Dan Reynolds
Specimen de la Fonderie A. Bertrand, 1880
The French XIXth century saw a rarely seen vitality in type design, whether it be on the side of typographical standards or ornamental and decorative typefaces. One of the books that gives a faithful glimpse into this period is A. Bertrand foundry’s catalog, and it has a quite surprising approach to the naming of its fonts.
The French XIXth century saw a rarely seen vitality in type design, whether it be on the side of typographical standards or ornamental and decorative typefaces. One of the books that gives a faithful glimpse into this period is A. Bertrand foundry’s catalog, and it has a quite surprising approach to the naming of its fonts.
The exhaustivity of the catalog brought an unexpected problem: how to name so many different typefaces? Once you go beyond a hundred fonts, you begin to run short of inspiration, and the usual categorizations don’t work for most of them. That’s how you find among the catalog a new kind of geographic typology: you journey through different regions of France with «Alsaciennes», «Bretonnes», «Normandes» (none of the faces being specifically from these regions).
A. Bertrand’s catalog makes you travel all around the world: if Egyptian faces seem to us pretty usual, what do you say of Luxemburgian, Italian, or Greek? Or even this page of Chinese, far from anything close to Chinese calligraphy or typography? All these eccentric names work towards creating a story for users to grab.
