TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Wed Nov 20 11:43:43 EST 2024
FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE |
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Laurens Janszoon Coster
The Dutch have claimed for hundreds of years that Laurens Janszoon Coster [or: Koster] (b. ca 1370, d. ca 1440) printed the first book in Haarlem (The Netherlands), ca. 1440, well before Johann Gutenberg in Mainz in 1452. There is no hard evidence to support or refute this claim, but Jan Middendorp in his "Dutch Type" (2004) categorically calls it a myth. From the link, I cite: "Warren Chappell's oft-referenced A Short History of the Printed Word, published in 1970, states that the "quality of the early Dutch type-making and printing still extant is so markedly inferior to Gutenberg's that the possibility of a few years' priority is less important than Gutenberg's results." |
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Luc Devroye ⦿ School of Computer Science ⦿ McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 ⦿ lucdevroye@gmail.com ⦿ https://luc.devroye.org ⦿ https://luc.devroye.org/fonts.html |