Talk:Garamond/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Casliber (talk · contribs) 07:04, 30 January 2016 (UTC)

Wow, an interesting thing to write about! I'll read and make straightforward copyedits as I go (please revert if I inadvertently change the meaning). And jot queries below: Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 07:04, 30 January 2016 (UTC)


 *  ...are the small eye of the e and bowl of the a - looks funny with no quote marks or italics - just unadorned 'e' and 'a'.....not a hard call but something worth discussing I think.
 * OK. rephrased.
 * I'm not a fan of an isolated single sentence definition before the two lead paras. If there was a sentence about when the term came into common use, then para two would segue nicely and we'd have two paras.
 * agreed, changed.
 * link or explain ascenders.
 * yes, descenders too.


 * ... creating a design that seems organic and unadorned. - err, what's "organic" supposed to mean here?
 * added an explanation - essentially, looking not too far abstracted from handwriting - at least, not compared to what came next.


 * M which had no serif at top right - err, an illustration might be good here as I can't picture what this means.
 * Put one in the gallery at the bottom. Horrible picture (blowup of a scan obviously not intended to show the letters in detail) but I think it will do.
 * Hmmm, it'd be nice to get it nearer the text....let me think about this....


 * a design so eccentric --> "a design held/thought/considered to be so eccentric"
 * added a bit more explanation of why that is.


 * Claude Garamond's name is written both as Garamont and Garamond. Using "Garamont" might make the prose clearer when it refers to the person or font...
 * Good point. I think though it's best to standardise on Garamond since that's what people expect in English. Mosley has commented on this as not being ideal.


 * I think some context is needed about where Garamont was - reading the body of text one has no idea. I added that he was French but might be better to say Parisian....
 * Added, yes. Nobody really has a clue where he grew up or what he was doing until he was about 30 although since his mother lived in Paris at the time of his death a whole life spent there seems likely...


 *  glamorous  - might be more NPOV to say "highly-regarded" or something
 * Good point. I've rephrased.


 * The Jean Jannon misattribution segment is unclear - this font was widely called Garamond at the time I presume? Otherwise why is it here..?
 * Fonts at that stage often didn't have individual names - normally they were named by size, although often they were named after their creator. The name 'Garamond' really only gets going in the early twentieth century, after other fonts that look different had started to be created. It's at this point when the misattribution of Jannon's work to Garamond happens. (In Garamond's time, all fonts looked like his - his were just seen as a bit better executed - so the question of naming wasn't really important. This is why there's so little certainty about what he actually did and didn't make.) Rephrased that section and added a picture.


 *  Jannon-derived types are most immediately recognizable by the lowercase a - umm, then it would be ciritical to have a box comparing the lowercase 'a's (and possibly m,n and r) I would have thought.
 * Drat, that must have in from an early draft before I got involved. It's much more the 'm', 'n' and 'r' that are distinctive. Rephrased. The image that shows it is the collection of revivals all saying 'agnostic'.


 * Not having encountered Granjon's name before leaves me wondering whether Adobe Garamond is more like original garamond or Jannon...
 * It's as based on Garamond as anything anyone can realistically release today can be. The regular style is Garamond's, the italic is based on Granjon's (although edited to harmonise with the regular), and the bold and semi-bold come from Slimbach's imagination, since they didn't exist in Garamond's time. And of course massively regularised compared to wonky old metal type to fit modern expectations.


 *  he realised this vision - aargh, sounds like a glossy page advert....rephrase
 * True.


 * How does Garamond Premier differ from Adobe Garamond anyway.....
 * Hard to describe and I haven't found any sources that explain it well. (I also don't have a license, so I can't create a sample image.) But basically, its design goes to extremes of style (very delicate, very solid) since it's made in styles for different text sizes (see the large-size version for instance). I would say as a personal opinion that to me it more resembles revivals of Garamond from the twentieth century. (What I have done is put in a sample image of EB Garamond to show what optical sizes do.) I wish I could find a good picture of Garamond Premier, since it's by far the most complete modern Garamond-based font - ironically Thomas Phinney is on Wikipedia, so you could ask him for a quote! But he was recently made CEO of his company so I imagine he's quite busy right now - I told him about nominating and he did make one very sensible change to the article but no more than that...


 * Do we get any global figures that help indicate popularity of the font or subfonts? Either now or historically?
 * I can't see that happening, sorry. The Coles article uses a straightforward sample of a specific, limited number of books that were up for an award.
 * Fair enough - we can only add what is sourced....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 00:29, 6 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Contrary to many folks, I like In popular culture sections...they generally work better as prose with some encompassing statements. See if you can do that here.
 * Yeah. The 'In popular culture' is none of it my work (I heavily cut it down, you can't list every book printed in Garamond-revival type) and it's such a mixture I can't imagine fashioning it into coherent prose. I have to say, I think it's better as disconnected bullet points.
 * Not a deal-breaker and can't be done if no encompassing statements....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 00:29, 6 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Given when one is reading footnotes, one is moving between body of text and footnote, I think they go better above the references. I've done this at many articles I've worked on - see Corona Borealis for instance.
 * Good idea. Done.

All in all, a fascinating read. I am not familiar with the subject but am interested - I think it needs some more context to get it to make sense in places. As it comes together I might have some more ideas. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 10:18, 30 January 2016 (UTC)

Brilliant, thanks. That's a lot of helpful feedback and I'm planning how to incorporate those comments into the article now.

Running through some of those comments, I'll just add a few notes. I expect to be thinking myself over the next day or about how to rephrase and thought I should note down (partly for myself!) what's going on.

I'm adding a gallery for pictures. Looking into rights situation for images of historic books and on Wikimedia commons. I really want to add a few more pictures of Garamond's original type (and that of his contemporaries) now without overloading the article.
 * Done this now, using a sample of print in Garamond's type from the 1740s.

A subtext running through the article (which I don't quite dare state because it would be opinion) is that there was a lot of reverence for the name of Garamond, one of the most famous creators of metal type in the early days of Parisian printing. So people seem to have been keen to revive the holy work of Garamond - whatever scholarship thought that was that particular week! Garamond seems to have been one of the most respected artisans of his time (not that he ever got very much money out of it!) and memory of his reputation lingered after people forgot what type he actually cut.

So a quick chronology, following Mosley. In 1745, the type of Garamond and his colleagues (or in the style of it) was still very much in use in Paris, almost two hundred years after his career had ended. Mouldering in a box in a back room at the Royal Printing office too was some type by Jean Jannon. Over the next sixty years or so, printers in Paris disposed of all their old metal type, moulds etc. following a transition in taste. Apparently the only original Garamond type saved was in Antwerp at what is now the Plantin-Moretus Museum.

Fast forward again to the late nineteenth century. Interest in Garamond's work (and that of his contemporaries) was increasing. The National Printing Office, knowing Garamond once created Greek type for them, discovers Jannon's matrices in the back office and decides Garamond made it too. All the first 'Garamond' revivals were based on it, not anything Garamond himself did. Once people realised he didn't make it, well, people forgot about Jannon's work again! So actually it's the reverse: the first modern 'Garamond' fonts were actually based on Jannon's work, the 'Garamond' on your computer included. The authentic ones actually came later.

Granjon: it's simple. Garamond doesn't seem to have ever bothered to take too much interest in italics - at the time these were created separately to regular type. A printer would use one in a book or the other for body text, but not so much italics for emphasis inside body text as now. (I'm not clear on why this is, but printers have historically thought his italics weren't as good as his roman type.) So most revivals don't use his italics: they use ones developed by Granjon. Adobe Garamond's upright (roman) is based on Garamond, as are all the revivals listed as such. Jannon worked at a slightly later date where the regular/italic system we know today had been established, and he does seem to have created matching roman and italic type. So the revivals based on Jannon's work use his italic, as Monotype Garamond does. (The Warde article has a specimen of Jannon's type and the italic which I've mentioned, and they look almost identical - though I think with a few edits to fit the limits of printing technology of the time, which wasn't great at dealing with heavily overlapping letters.)

No serif at top right: simple. Open Word on your computer and set the font to Garamond. Look at the capital 'M'. Now imagine that with no spike (serif) on the top right. It really does look like Manutius's book De Aetna had this glitch by accident and his French imitators decided to copy that for whatever reason. A good place to see that is this scan of it (caution: 10MB file), p. 28, bottom right. You'll see that the 'M' there clearly has a serif at top left but not so much on top right.

Spelling of Garamond's name: not with out reservations, I've decided to standardise on Garamond because that's what people expect in English. But I realise this isn't historically correct. (Mosley has written about this himself.)

Not that it matters just yet, since I'm working on the text, but the main references are: the French Ministry of Culture site and 'Paleotypography' books are by far the most important books on Garamont's work himself; Warde's 1928ish article is an important summary of scholarship and interest in his work up to that point (it was when that was put online that I realised I could really get this article to be good); Professor Mosley's articles (some of them are on his own blog) are also very good historical sources. As you've probably gathered, this is a bit of a pet (amateur) project so my goal was to try to bring all the references I could find together so some others are really just there to back those up or because they explain things a bit better-it's still not an ideal situation as journals on printing history are rare and digitisation of past journal articles is effectively non-existent. It's not a field with the standard of completeness and extensive journal coverage we're used to in science and medicine. I am a bit limited on what I can add on Garamond himself though (I don't speak French) so that section of the article is kept reasonably simple... Thanks for all the feedback once again!

Blythwood (talk) 14:42, 30 January 2016 (UTC)


 * So timeline now finished and I've now spelled out much more of the information which up to now was in links. Still running through each of your points and thinking about images though. Blythwood (talk) 14:21, 31 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Re:turnitin: All of those are verbatim quotes and cited. I have to say, Mosley writes beautifully (he's one of the people who really should write some magisterial four-volume history of printing but is clearly never going to) and I felt it was worth putting a bit of his writing in the article. I don't think they're very extensive quotes.

1. Well written?:
 * Prose quality:
 * Manual of Style compliance:

2. Factually accurate and verifiable?:
 * References to sources:
 * Citations to reliable sources, where required:
 * No original research:

3. Broad in coverage?:
 * Major aspects:
 * Focused:

4. Reflects a neutral point of view?:
 * Fair representation without bias:

5. Reasonably stable?
 * No edit wars, etc. (Vandalism does not count against GA):

6. Illustrated by images, when possible and appropriate?:
 * Images are copyright tagged, and non-free images have fair use rationales: going through this presently... their age is good for us and copyright....
 * Images are provided where possible and appropriate, with suitable captions:

Overall:
 * Pass or Fail:  - checking images now.  As well - a chunk of text is identical  - scroll down here and see. Distancing them would be good. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 00:35, 6 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Sorry, my bad - I missed the attribution. That's okay. Just had to duck off am make a load of nachos cheese in the oven for the kids....and a coffee for me... :) Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 00:50, 6 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Brilliant. Enjoy the nachos! Blythwood (talk) 00:57, 6 February 2016 (UTC)