esigning a new Roman style typeface is no minor undertaking. I began to research Jenson and its offspring. After some time I came to the conclusion that the best Jenson is the original and so decided to base my face directly on that. I called Paul Gehl, curator of the Wing Collection at the Newberry Library and he arranged for me to view some of Jenson’s books from 1470–74. Seeing the original Jenson, particularly in the 1470 Ecclesiastical Histories of the ancient author Eusebius, was better than I had expected. Jenson firsthand has a warm, human, energetic and quirky quality that is found in no other face. Perhaps it expresses the personality of its creator.
The Newberry staff made me numerous transparencies of the Jenson and from these I had large stats made and set about drawing my own letterforms. I had drawn one version of the roman alphabet and was starting work on a first revision when Bruce Beck walked into my office. Bruce is the elder statesman of the Chicago design community—a leader both professionally and personally. He is a recipient of the Middleton award, the American Center for Design’s (better known as Society of Typographic Arts) highest award and counts among his pupils Rick Valicenti. He had shepherded an important book on type designer Robert Middleton through the creative process of the Caxton Club and had long had a keen interest in type design. His basement is the home of an extensive, active letterpress shop. We had worked together on various projects for about five years.
Bruce took a look at what I was working on and said something like, “So you’re drawing a new version of Jenson. Have you ever taken a look at Eusebius?.” I said “No,” since I had never heard of the face. The next day Bruce came back with printed samples and the metal pattern prints of Eusebius, which had come his way via the family of Robert Middleton. The original drawings for the roman font had been drawn by Ernst Detterer (incidentally one of Paul Gehl’s predecesors at the Newberry), and Middleton had drawn the italic and supervised the completion of the Eusebius family.
I took a look at the samples and decided that Ludlow’s Eusebius had captured the spirit of Jenson better than anything else I had found. I knew that I would want to make some changes, but saw that I could save considerable time by starting with the Eusebius patterns. I would continue to refer to the original Jenson “Eusebius” and perhaps I could come up with a hybrid that would be a successful digital face. It is perhaps interesting that the copy of “Eusebius” in the Newberry Library that I used is the same copy that Bruce Rogers used in making drawings for his Centaur.
Copyright ©1997 Paul Baker and Paul Gehl
1st revision September 21, 1996