Talk:Victor Lardent

Wiki Education assignment: History of Modern Design
— Assignment last updated by Antje Gamble (talk) 16:17, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Victor Lardent
Hi there !

I try to look after the Wikipedia articles on typeface design and typography, although I hadn’t previously dealt with Lardent’s article much beyond adding sources (there are just some things I haven't got round to, this was one of them). I’m really glad to see people interested in this topic-editing Wikipedia is a lot of fun and I hope you stick at it. I see you’re editing Wikipedia as part of a university project and I hope it’s going well.

I have to admit I hadn’t got round to doing up this article and so much of the best information I have on the topic is in the Times New Roman article, which I’ve spent a lot more time on and links to the relevant sources. The best summary is Walter Tracy’s book Letters of Credit from page 193.

The reason I didn’t get back to you before was that I was scheduled to see a talk by Nicolas Barker, Morison’s biographer, today-I had not met him before. He is about ninety now but very sharp (you can see my photo of him in his article now). He was kind enough to briefly speak to me about Lardent, who he knew, and Morison after the talk. He said Lardent was a talented artist, a "remarkable" man with an airbrush. He told me that he spoke extensively to Lardent at the time, and that Lardent never said to him that he felt he didn’t get credit for the design. He told me that Lardent worked with Morison again later to do art for Morison's book Politics and Script. I need to add a source and add this to the article.

Incidentally, I asked Barker why he felt Times New Roman was successful, and he mentioned some points I've never heard before. He said that it looked very good in 4¾ point in the personal column, and in 4-line matrices, and that it had a good balance of ascenders and descenders. (He also told me that he’d never looked at his Wikipedia article when I apologised if I’d got anything wrong, and said “Have you really!” when I told him I’d read his biography of Morison. I am a bit of a snotty kid, it’s true...)

I'm going to summarise here some thoughts on your edits and things I might add to or change in the article. Going to other points, one thing to explain is that Christophe Plantin was a printer who used many types. Types in those days didn’t have names, they were individually cut by specific artisans who might cut different designs at different sizes. You can see Plantin’s type specimen here to get a sense of this. There is a typeface called Plantin-it was based on one specific type by Robert Granjon, now in the museum of Plantin’s printing workshop, the Plantin-Moretus Museum, although it actually didn’t come to Plantin's company until after his death, as that article explains. This type was showcased in a specimen the museum published in 1905. Plantin was based on it and Times New Roman was based on that.

Walter Tracy comments that in Lardent’s interview with Moran Lardent said he though he’d used a book printed by Plantin as a model. Tracy thinks it’s more likely that what Morison showed Lardent was the 1905 specimen. In any case, as Tracy points out, Times looks very different to Plantin (Plantin on a diet, one person put it) so it couldn’t have been much he took from whatever he saw. In any case, it probably wasn’t the typeface Plantin but a type from the Plantin-Moretus Museum. Finally, as Tracy explains, Lardent's designs were then adapted by Monotype's drawing team-they were very sharp, designed for large sizes, they would have needed adaptation to work printed at the smallest sizes.

I plan on integrating this into the Wikipedia article, rereading and sourcing and adding line-by-line sourcing soon, maybe later today. Any questions on all this, please let me know-I'll try to help! Blythwood (talk) 22:11, 10 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Most of the changes added now. Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts or things you were thinking about adding to the article, I'll try to help quickly if I can. One thing I've done is changed referencing to shortened footnotes, which is a particularly useful format for citing lots of different pages from the same book. Blythwood (talk) 00:25, 11 November 2022 (UTC)