Pretty pilcrow

I just refreshed this site’s stylesheet, it looks less Blogger-ish now and tweaked a bit the typography.

I’ve been reading two new books on typography. The first is Robin Kinross’ Modern Typography, on which I’ll report once I’ve finished it, the other is Lucrezia e Paulina by Adriano Filippetti and Francesco Mantovani. It’s a book (in Italian, sorry guys) about Francesco Griffo da Bologna’s work with scholarly research, very well written, and the digitalization of two typefaces:

• Paulina by Adriano Filippetti which has a roman and italic cut, and comes from the book Paulina, de recta paschae celebratione: et de die passionis domini nostri Iesu Christi, written by Paulus de Middelburgo and published by Ottaviano Petrucci with a new roman type cut by Francesco Griffo in 1513 in Fossombrone, Italy.
• Lucrezia by Francesco Mantovani, which is an italic-only typeface with upright capitals inspired by the work of Francesco Griffo and other chancery scripts from the late 15th/early 16th century.

As I said, the bit that I enjoyed the most are the two historic introductions about the work of Ottaviano Petrucci and his collaboration with Francesco Griffo, and on the italic scripts from the Renaissance. The typefaces are well drawn, but I can’t comment too much on them because unfortunately the book doesn’t present them too well as far as samples go.

The Paulina typeface has a nice form of pilcrow which I redrew as an excercise and that might end up in the alternate set for Rest: you can see it at the top of this post (or more in detail on my Flickr space).

If you are interested in the life and works of Francesco Griffo da Bologna and can read Italian I highly recommend this book, which can be bought from AIAP.