Claude Garamond

Garamond was one of the first independent punchcutters, specialising in type design and punch-cutting as a service to others rather than working in house for a specific printer.

In 1539, when Francis I wanted to create a print shop in Paris to publish greek texts, Garamond was recruited to provide type for the printer Conrad Neobar.

[23] Garamond came to prominence around 1540, when three of his Greek typefaces (now called the Grecs du roi (1541)) were requested for a royally-ordered book series by Robert Estienne.

[28][29] The result is an immensely complicated set of type, including a vast variety of alternate letters and ligatures to simulate the flexibility of handwriting.

Many engravers were active over this time, including Garamond, Robert Granjon, Guillaume Le Bé, Antoine Augereau, Simon de Colines, Pierre Haultin and others, creating typefaces not just in the Latin alphabet, but also in Greek and Hebrew for scholarly use.

[39] This period saw the creation of a pool of high-quality punches and matrices that would supply the French printing industry, to a large extent, for the next two centuries.

In November 1561, following his death, his equipment, punches, and matrices were inventoried and sold off to purchasers including Guillaume Le Bé, Christophe Plantin, and André Wechel.

[43] The chaotic sales caused problems, and Le Bé's son wrote to Plantin's successor Moretus offering to trade matrices so they could both have complementary type in a range of sizes.