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Monticello
[Charles Creesy]
A type-historical article by Charles Creesy, Director of Publishing Technologies, Princeton University Press, about the Monticello typeface. Summarizing the lifeline of this typeface from Creesy's analysis: - We start with a type by Archibald Binny and James Ronaldson at their Philadelphia-based foundry in 1796. It was different than what is known today as the Binny&Ronaldson 1812. It was in character similar to styles created by John Baine. In this handset form, it went through three iterations spanning about a century.
- In 1940, C.H. Griffith at the Mergenthaler Company with the aid of Princeton University Press's Pleasant Jefferson ("P.J.") Conkwright (a book designer and book typographer) set out to convert it to Linotype. This revival was called Monticello---it was to be used to publish The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. The first Linotype proof, labeled "10 point Monticello Experimental No. 285", dates from 1944.
- Two early unsatisfactory digital renditions were created in the 1980s. These were used to print the Jefferson Papers but the fonts were based on poor scans.
- In 2002, a digital version tailored to produce photopolymer plates for letter-press printing was created for Andrew Hoyem's Arion Press in San Francisco. It was Andrew Hoyem's and Linnea Lundquist's Aitken.
- In 2003, Matthew Carter returned to Griffith's type and made a digital family called Monticello for the Princeton University Press. In the process, he beefed up the serifs and the outlines a bit, as they had lost weight in the preceding iterations.
Quoting John Berry: {Carter's Monticello] is a comfortably readable typeface in a style that now looks old but familiar to us. [...] I can easily imagine Monticello, in its new form, becoming a very popular book typeface once again." Creesy concludes: Despite - or perhaps because of - its Scotch heritage and multifarious influences from the Old World, it can also lay claim to being our quintessentially American font.
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