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ABOUT

Miklós Tótfalusi Kis

Miklós Tótfalusi Kis (Nicholas Kis) was born in Misztótfalu, Hungary, in 1650. He left for Amsterdam in 1680, where he worked on la Biblia Hungara (1685), Book of Hymns of San David (1686), and the New Testament (1687). He also published many books for children. Taught there by Dirk Voskens, he made what is now known as Janson Text around 1690. Around 1690, he made an elegant face, Nikis. He died in 1702. The story of Kis's types, now also known as Dutch types, is eloquently told by Daidala based on research by Bringhurst, Lawson, Morrison and Carter. Types influenced by him include Stempel Janson (1937, based on his original matrices), Mergenthaler Linotype Janson (1954, by Hermann Zapf; digitized in 1985), Monotype Ehrhardt (1938, named after the Ehrhardt foundry in Leipzig, where in the early 1700s his types were found), Nikis (finished by Hell Design Studio (now Linotype); see Nikis EF) and Adobe Janson (based on the original matrices as well). The name Janson comes from Anton Janson, a typographer who worked in Leipzig. Janson was incorrectly credited with the designs of Kis's typefaces. Note: since 1919, Kis's original matrices are in the hands of Stempel. John Tranter recalls the Kis/Janson affair: "In his book On Type Faces, published in 1923, the great typographic historian Stanley Morison describes a roman and italic typeface that he said was cut by Anton Janson, a seventeenth-century Dutch type foundry owner. By the 1920s the typeface had fallen into disuse, and when it was revived for the modern age on both Linotype and Monotype machines in 1937, it was named 'Janson' after its presumed designer. Even the German Stempel foundry, who owned the original 'Janson' punches and matrices from the 1600s, called it by that name. The typeface became more and more widely used. Robert Bringhurst (a poet as well as a typographer) refers to it as a wonderfully toothy and compact Baroque type. In the United States it is now the third most popular typeface for book composition, according to its frequency of appearance in the 'Fifty Books of the Year' annual exhibition organised by the American Institute of Graphic Arts. In 1939 Stanley Morison uncovered the embarrassing fact that the typeface had not been cut by Janson, but even he was unable to put his finger on the designer. It was not until the 1950s that Harry Carter and George Buday discovered that the man who had designed the type was a Transylvanian Hungarian named Nicholas (or Miklós) Kis, born in 1650. Kis took religious orders and became a teacher, and eventually decided to visit Holland and study typography, as those skills were needed in Hungary. He turned out to be very gifted at punchcutting, the shaping of metal type, and became so famous in his own time that Cosimo de Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, offered him a position at his court. Kis declined the offer, and returned to Hungary in 1690, determined to spend the rest of his life designing and printing bibles. It was a time of religious and political upheaval in Hungary. The social turmoil, together with personal enmities, shortened his life, and Kis died in 1702, an embittered man. His reputation had to wait 250 years for proper recognition; and such is the conservative nature of the world of type that the typeface he created is still called 'Janson'." Adobe writes that the model for Janson Text was mistakenly attributed to the Dutch printer Anton Janson. Bitstream explains: His types, the original matrices for which were obtained by Stempel in 1919, were revived for hot metal as Janson by C.H. Griffith for Mergenthaler Linotype (1937), and as Janson and Ehrhardt (1937) from Monotype.

Good digitizations exist of Monotype Ehrhardt. Frutiger supervised Linotype's digitization as Janson Text (1985). Bitstream's digitization is Kis. David Berlow at Font Bureau did a revival in 2007 called Kis FB. Berthold Kis BQ and Kis Classico (Franko Luin) round out the set of interpretations and revivals. Bio by Nicholas Fabian.

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Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ History of type ⦿ Dutch type design ⦿ Type design in Hungary ⦿