Posted on November 13th, 2008 at 6:38 am by Rabbit
Paris was exhausting in its beauty. It took all of last week to settle my sleep back into a regular schedule. But here I am again, well rested, tragically unemployed and consequently with plenty of time on my hands to give a proper update.
While in Paris I intended to visit the Imprimerie Nationale and the Bibliothèque Forney. I couldn’t determine from the Internet whether or not the Impremerie was still in operation, or if it had perhaps been privatized and no longer open to the public. So I decided to forgo that trip, though in retrospect I wish I had at least ventured over that way.
The Bibliothèque Forney, however, was open. The institution houses the type drawings and library of the now defunct Deberny & Peignot foundry. A bit of background from The Elements of Typographic Style:
Joseph Gaspard Gillé the elder, one of Fournier’s apprentices, opened his own foundry in Paris in 1748[...] In 1827 the novelist Honoré de Balzac acquired the foundry as part of his intended writing, printing and publishing empire. The scheme failed at once, but the foundry was rescued by its manager and bought by Alexandre de Berny.
Gustave Peignot entered separately into the typefounding business in 1865. His own foundry entered its first creative phase under his son and grandson Georges and Charles Peignot, who issued historical revivals of the work of Jean Jannon and created a series of types based on the letterings of the eighteeth-century engraver Nicolas Cochin.
The De Berny & Peignot foundries merged in 1923. Under the guidance of Charles Peignot, the enlarged firm issued new designs by Adolphe Cassandre, Adrian Frutiger and others. When D&P ceased production in 1975, the type drawings and company library went to the Bibliothèque Forney, Paris, and most of the typographic material - including a set of original Baskerville matrices - to the Haas (now Fruttiger) Foundry, Münchenstein. Baskerville’s punches, also formerly help by D&P, are now at the University Library Cambridge.
The staff was extraordinarily helpful with my requests and gracious toward my non existent French (a special thanks here is due to Typfoundry for keeping an archive of important typographic resources. That entry insured that my spelling of all the important names was correct, which is absolutely essential when you have to communicate though written slips of paper! Do check out the journal, it is a fascinating delight.). While I was examining some specimens, one of the librarians who had been helping me excitedly rushed into the reading room and told me that a member of the Peignot family was at the library to deposit some additional documents for the collection and wanted to know if I should like to meet him. I of course said yes. This man turned out to be Monsieur Jean-Luc Froissart, grandson to Georges Peignot and nephew to Charles Peignot, an absolutely charming gentleman and fantastic story teller.
Monsieur Froissart sat with me for over an hour and regaled me with stories and gossip about the family, giving a delightfully human sheen to the material in front of me. He scowled when he spoke of the grandmother who had insisted on the foundry only designing inline type (an edict which did not prevail), beamed when talking about Georges Peignot, and sighed at his personal perceived incompetence of Charles. Monsieur Froissart had written a book about his family and a copy was in the library. We looked at the plates together. My favorite was a photograph of Charles, boldly bare chested and in sharp profile, taken by Man Ray. “Naked,” the librarian chuckled.
The serendipity was incredible and perhaps the crowning element of my trip. I had to sign many documents stating that I would not publicize any photographs I took of the collection, so I can’t share any of my beautiful pictures. However, Monsieur Froissart is not part of the collection, and so I leave you with this portrait.
Monsieur Jean-Luc Froissart