Centaur (typeface)

Category	Serif
Classification	Old-style, Venetian
Designer(s)	Bruce Rogers Frederic Warde Nicolas Jenson Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi
Foundry	Monotype Corporation
Date created	1914
Date released	1929
Also known as	Metropolitan

Centaur is a serif typeface by book and typeface designer Bruce Rogers, based on the Renaissance-period printing of Nicolas Jenson around 1470. It was given widespread release by Monotype, paired with an italic design by Frederic Warde.

Centaur is an elegant and quite slender design, an effect possibly amplified in the digital release. It was designed for fine book printing and is often used both for printing body text and also titles and headings.^[1] One of its most notable uses has been in the designs of Penguin Books, who have regularly used it for titling.^[2]

Historical background

Jenson's roman type, from a 1475 edition.

Rogers' primary influence was Nicholas Jenson's 1470 Eusebius, considered the model for the modern upright printing of the Roman alphabet, which Rogers studied through enlarged photographs.^[3] Centaur also shows the influence of types cut by Francesco Griffo in 1495 for a small book titled De Aetna written by Pietro Bembo. The typeface is classified as belonging to the humanist style of old-style designs, based on the predominant influence of Jenson's work. The style is also called Venetian for the city Jenson worked in during his career as a printer.

Arrighi's italic typeface design, ca. 1527. At the time italic capitals had not been invented, but were always upright in the Roman inscriptional tradition.

The inspiration for Centaur's italic comes from thirty years later, in the calligraphy and printing of Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi.^[4] Arrighi was a Rome-based calligrapher who made the transition to working in printing, releasing a writing manual, La operina…', and other printed works.^{[5][6][lower-alpha 1]} These used an italic font presumably based on his calligraphy.^[9] It inspired later French italic types from 1528 onwards.^{[10][11][lower-alpha 2]}

Revival

Rogers' revival was originally drawn as titling capitals in 1914 for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.^[3] Rogers later expanded it, adding lower case, for his 1915 limited edition of Maurice de Guérin's The Centaur.

For the original release, matrices were cut by Robert Wiebking and the type was privately cast by American Type Founders. Some years later, the Monotype Corporation commissioned Rogers to release it for the general market. Rogers did not feel able to create a matching italic, and asked the calligrapher Frederic Warde if he could pair Centaur with a design Warde had created based upon Ludovico Arrighi’s 1520 chancery face, made in 1926 for the Officina Bodoni.^[12] Warde's design had the separate name Arrighi, which appears in some earlier specimens.^[3][13]

The completed family was released for general use in 1929, with a first showing in Monotype's specimen booklet The Trained Printer and the Amateur by Alfred W. Pollard.^[14][15] Monotype described it as a 'long-descender type of great distinction', emphasising its feeling of not having been restricted to allow tighter linespacing, as other types often had been in the hot metal period.^[16] Monotype has sold the design with bold and bold italic designs (their invention, since bold type did not exist until much later), and swash italic alternate characters.^[17]

Centaur shows some of the irregularities of early type compared to later designs. The dots of the i and j are very visibly shifted to the right, a feature of Jenson's original design. The e's horizontal stroke is slanted, not exactly horizontal as came to be the norm in print. On the other hand, the italic capitals slope in the modern tradition, which was established after Jenson and Arrighi's time in the later 16th century.^[18]

Digitisations

Centaur has been digitised, both by Monotype in collaboration with Adobe, and by LTC, who assumed the rights to many Lanston (American) Monotype typefaces under the name of Metropolitan. The revivals have slightly different features; Monotype’s having a bold and bold italic and swash caps and LTC’s having a more complex, less smooth digitisation with many italic alternates and complementary ornaments.^[19][20] A number of amateur revivals have also been developed, none complete as of 2015.

Related fonts

Other Monotype fonts of the hot metal period inspired by Renaissance printing included Lutetia by Jan van Krimpen (another Venetian design), Bembo (with a roman based on a slightly later font used by Aldus Manutius) and Dante.

Among other Venetian revivals, Adobe Jenson is a notable and extremely complete digital revival from 1996 with features such as optical size fonts for different text sizes. William Morris's Golden Type began revivals of the Jenson style in 1892 with a more solid structure (no matching italic was created for it), while Morris Fuller Benton's Cloister was created around 1915 during the same period as Centaur.^[21][22] Ludlow created another release with italic under the direction of Ernst F. Detterer and Robert Hunter Middleton in the 1920s.^[23] American Type Founders also issued a very eccentric Jenson revival inspired by the work of Morris which is little-known today.^[24] Tobias Frere-Jones created a revival in 1994 named Hightower that is bundled with some Microsoft software, adding his own italic design.^[25]

Usage

Outside its common uses, Centaur is also used for the wordmark of John Varvatos and in the children's book Crispin: The Cross of Lead, set in the Middle Ages.^[26][27]

References

• Blackwell, Lewis. 20th Century Type. Yale University Press: 2004. ISBN 0-300-10073-6.
• Fiedl, Frederich, Nicholas Ott and Bernard Stein. Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Through History. Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. ISBN 1-57912-023-7.
• Lawson, Alexander S., Anatomy of a Typeface. Godine: 1990. ISBN 978-0-87923-333-4.
• Meggs, Philip B. and Rob Carter. Typographic Specimens: The Great Typefaces. Wiley: 1993. ISBN 0-471-28429-7.
• Meggs, Philip B. and McKelvey, Roy. Revival of the Fittest: Digital Versions of Classic Typefaces. RC Publications: 2000. ISBN 1-883915-08-2.
• Updike, Daniel Berkeley. Printing Types Their History, Forms and Use. Dover Publications, Inc: 1937, 1980. ISBN 0-486-23929-2.

External links

Bruce Rogers:

• Cover of the book The Centaur printed by Bruce Rogers

Professional digitisations:

• LTC Metropolitan - the LTC digitisation with many italic alternates and small caps in regular and italic, but no bold as in the original or swash caps
• Monotype digitisation (includes swash letters in italic and small caps in the regular style only)
  • Adobe release
  • Jenson Recut - alternative Fontsite release; name changed for legal reasons, basic character set

Amateur projects:

• Coelacanth — Unfinished open-source implementation with optical sizes
• Museum — Unfinished open-source implementation by Raph Levien, optical sizes but no italics

Monotype typefaces 1900s Binny Old Style 1910s Imprint Plantin 1920s Garamond Bodoni Poliphilus Blado Fournier Engravers Baskerville Horley Old Style Grotesque Colonna Bernard MT Gallia Pastonchi Gill Sans Othello Lutetia Solus Perpetua Centaur with Arrighi Bembo 1930s Bell Braggadocio Leysbourne Placard Kino Script Falstaff Inflex Littleworth Times New Roman Walbaum Monoline Script Rockwell Colmcille Runic Menhart Ashley Crawford Felix Titling Tempest Titling Van Dijck Emerson Gwendolin Gill Kayo Romulus Albertus Joanna (for private use) Twentieth Century Ehrhardt Pegasus Matura Sachsenwald Haarlemmer Bulmer 1940s Figaro 1950s Festival Titling Spectrum Angelus Klang Ashley Script Fontana Swing Castellar Headline Bold Mercurius Script Joanna (general release) Dante Pepita 1960s Octavian Forte Apollo Traveller Albertina Cartier New Berolina Fleet Titling Sabon Barbou 1970s Photina 1980s Calvert Nimrod Arial Footlight Calisto Cantoria 1990s Amasis Century Gothic Book Antiqua Curlz Carré Noir Gill Facia Cachet 2000s Neo Sans Slate 2010s Joanna Sans Release dates are approximate only. Not all typefaces shown.