OSE

Punchcutters work absorbed in thought. Their dexterous fingers steady, their minds in a trance — gracefully guiding their gravers with minuscule movements. Perhaps it’s not too far-fetched to imagine our punchcutter in question; the Parisian Claude Garamond (1480–1561) adrift in reverie, mulling over the various widths of letterforms. He was a man of the Renaissance, a humanist at heart. The pursuit of divine proportion was one of his guiding principles. And yet carving away at his workshop on Rue Saint-Jacques, with the distant clatter of carts, and the creaking of presses in action, could he have conceived of a type cut of equal width? Some sort of monospaced Garamond? a... Garamono?