The Fonts on Your Screen Were Born in This [Antwerp] Museum
The letters you read all day have a birthplace, and it’s in Belgium, writes Phil Brown
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The title and intro line you just read uses a typeface, or font, called Alike. What you’re reading now is Alike. Alike is what’s known as a serif font, those signature flicks, tails and decorative elements you’ve been looking at in newspapers and magazines for centuries. You almost never notice the shapes of the letters themselves, you just read the word, undistracted, but still enjoying an aura of quality – which is kind of the point of a good typeface.
But those shapes weren’t invented on a computer or in some design agency studio by bunch of Mad Men ad executives. They were carefully drawn, etched, and cast in iron to create a letterset, and it’s apparently in Antwerp’s Museum Plantin-Moretus where some of the world’s most famous fonts came into being.
In the tall, creaking house on a market square in Antwerp, the actual punches and matrices from which several of the western world's most-used letterforms descend. The best part is they’re still there, in the rooms where they were made, in a building most visitors to the city walk straight past. Even if you aren’t a design or typeface nerd, this compact Antwerp museums shares enough interesting stories to make it worth an afternoon if you’ve already seen Antwerp’s essentials.
The House That Printed the Renaissance
Christophe Plantin was a French bookbinder who settled in Antwerp and, around 1555, set up a printing and publishing house under the sign of the Golden Compass. The timing was good, as Antwerp was then one of the three great printing cities of early modern Europe alongside Paris and Venice.
Plantin went beyond the boom and built what became the most prolific printing house on the continent. In 1576 he moved the works to the Vrijdagmarkt, the Friday Market square, where it stayed.
What makes the place extraordinary is not that it existed, but that it survived whole, with much of the medieval printing hardware still accounted for. Plantin's descendants, the Moretus family, ran the business for roughly three centuries and, crucially, threw very little away.
When the last of them, Edward Moretus, sold the house and its entire contents to the City of Antwerp in 1876, the presses, the type, the account books and the furniture all came as part of the package. After some tidying, it opened to the public as a museum the following year. No other printing house from the period survives anywhere in this state, which is why UNESCO decided to make it the only museum on the World Heritage list.
The Drawers Full of Letters You Already Know
The museum holds a collection of several thousand original type punches and matrices, the small steel and copper objects from which printing type was struck and cast. According to the type specialists at Production Type, the engravers represented in those drawers read like a roll call of sixteenth-century typecutting, among them Robert Granjon, François Guyot, Pierre Haultin, Guillaume Le Bé, the Ghent founder Hendrik Van den Keere, and one Claude Garamont.
That last name might be familiar if you work in marketing or graphic design. Garamont's roman types are the root of the typeface the English-speaking world now spells Garamond, a font that ships, in one revival or another, on very nearly every computer sold. The museum does not hedge about it. On its Google Arts & Culture pages it describes holding "the original Garamond letter that adorns everyone's computer". The wording is fair. The digital Garamond on your machine is a descendant rather than a direct copy, with all of the imperfections removed, but the line of descent is real, and it passes through this house.
Plantin understood exactly what he had. He bought not just printed letters but the punches and matrices themselves, the means of production, so that rivals could not reproduce his typefaces. By the 1570s the Officina Plantiniana held the most extensive collection of typography in the world.
How a 1912 Visit Possibly Became Times New Roman
The type collection has done more than preserve the past. It seeded one of the most-used typefaces of the twentieth century.
In 1912 a Monotype engineer named Frank Hinman Pierpont travelled to the Plantin-Moretus Museum. He left with photographs and reproductions of historic type, including, as the superb Klim Type Foundry sets out, examples of a Gros Cicero cut by Robert Granjon.
Back at Monotype's factory in England, Pierpont and his drawing-office colleague Fritz Stelzer used that material to create a new typeface for machine composition. They named it Plantin, after the house, and released it in 1913.
Two decades later the typographer Stanley Morison was redesigning the type of The Times. He took Monotype's Plantin as the principal model, asking for something a little narrower and sharper, and the result, released in 1931, was Times New Roman. It went on to be installed on most personal computers on earth, a default for letters, essays and a great many of the documents you have ever opened.
Although it’s not necessarily true to say that Plantin-Moretus is ground zero for Times New Roman, Times doesn’t exist without it, although type historians (yes, that is a genuine career path) still debate exactly which specimen Morison's team worked from.
The Other Stuff Worth Seeing
The trays of letters are the headline, but the house is full or other curiosities too. Its centrepiece book is the Biblia Regia, the Polyglot Bible that Plantin printed for King Philip II of Spain between 1568 and 1573. A complete copy is on display, all eight folio volumes, setting scripture in parallel across Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Syriac and Latin. Surviving copies are scarce.
The museum and library records put the original run at around 1,200 paper copies, and, as the conservators at Johns Hopkins note, many were lost in a shipwreck on the way to Spain. To stand in front of one, in the building where it was printed and beside the typefaces cut for it, is to see the most ambitious book of the northern Renaissance as an object rather than a plate in a textbook.
The same goes for the printing room, where the museum keeps what it calls the two oldest surviving printing presses in the world. Plenty of collections own a historic press or pieces of them under glass, but here the entire apparatus survives in place, foundry, proofreader's desk, type store and presses together.
There is more besides. A copy of Abraham Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, widely regarded as the first modern atlas, first published in 1570 by a man who, like the house, was Antwerp born.
Beyond the objects and artefacts, the building itself is a treat. It has around thirty rooms, several lined in gilded leather, a baroque garden walled inside the building, and a library of tens of thousands of early printed books. The painter Peter Paul Rubens, a friend of the family, designed title pages for the press and painted the family portraits that still hang on the walls.
Because the books are light-sensitive, pages on display are turned periodically, so the open page you see is rarely the one the previous visitor saw.
Is Plantin-Moretus Worth Your Time if You Aren’t a Design Geek?
Antwerp has no shortage of things to see. There is the cathedral, the Rubens trail running across the city, the fashion district, the diamond quarter and the river. On a short visit, the printing museum is the easy one to skip, on the assumption that you can already guess what is inside.
But that’s probably the the case for going. Almost nowhere else lets you stand at the literal origin of the letters you are reading at this moment, in the rooms where they were cut, beside the books they built and the first modern atlas, printed under this very roof. There are no interactive displays, not long waiting lines and no tour groups. Walk in expecting old machinery and you will walk out having met the quiet source of how the western world reads.
Put it near the top of the list. Then glance down at this sentence on your way out, and notice, perhaps for the first time, the shape of every letter in it.