De Gulden Passer. Jaargang 38 bron De Gulden Passer. Jaargang 38. De Nederlandsche Boekhandel, Antwerpen 1960 Zie voor verantwoording: http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_gul005196001_01/colofon.php © 2015 dbnl i.s.m. 1 [De Gulden Passer 1960] Typographica plantiniana II. Early inventories of punches, matrices, and moulds, in the Plantin-Moretus archives The wealth of the typographical collections of the Plantin-Moretus Museum is well known. In particular Harry Carter has recently written at some length on Plantin's collection of punches and matrices.1. It was perhaps the largest and finest collection to be assembled in the sixteenth century, and is the only major collection from that era to survive intact. It consists of some 4,500 punches, 16,000 matrices, 4,500 strikes and 60 moulds, most of which date from the sixteenth century. There is no single source to which one can turn in the attempt to attribute and date all the typefaces represented by this material. Plantin's c. 1580 Folio Specimen gives showings of most of his types with the names by which he knew them, but makes no attributions and does not state whether he owned punches, matrices or only type for each. His business records with punchcutters and type-founders supply useful information on certain faces but are far from complete. A study of his books reveals how and when he used his types but gives no idea of who cut them. However, the series of inventories made of their typographical property by Plantin, his associates, and his successors provides attributions for most of the faces and establishes a framework on which all the other information can be collected and understood. The material to which they refer comes from the hands of two schools of punchcutters whose work Plantin brought together. He imported from France typefaces by Claude Garamont, Pierre Hautin, Robert Granjon, and Guillaume I Le Bé. The work of 1. Harry Carter, ‘Plantin's Types and Their Makers’, in Gedenkboek der Plantin Dagen, Antwerp, 1955, pp. 247-269 and ‘The Types of Christopher Plantin’, in The Library, 5th Ser., XI (1956), pp. 170-179. De Gulden Passer. Jaargang 38 2 these great Frenchmen derives from the finest Italian models and has never been surpassed. The local Flemish punchcutters and typefounders, Joos Lambrecht, Ameet Tavernier and Hendrik van den Keere the Younger2. were working in a different tradition. Their principal work is a magnificent series of Flemish blackletter. Between 1569 and 1580 Plantin bought, and in many cases commissioned from Hendrik van den Keere series of blackletters, musics, romans, titlings and fleurons of the highest quality. Through his typecasting activities for Plantin, van den Keere became thoroughly familiar with the French styles, and in consequence his own work derives from both schools. In his romans he combines the sophisticated French forms with something of the economical proportions and sturdy weight relationships of his familiar Flemish blackletter. These romans, introduced in Holland through Plantin's Leyden office, appear to have been the first in the family of strong, economical, ‘Dutch’- style romans that reached international importance in the seventeenth century with the work of Christoffel van Dijck, Willem Janszoon Blaeu, the Voskens, Nicholas Kis, and their school and ended in the eighteenth century with the work of William Caslon and his imitators in England. The inventories discussed in the following pages clearly outline the history of Plantin's own typographical collection. The first short list which mentions only four sets of matrices dates from 1556, the second year of Plantin's career as a printer. The inventories dating from 1561 to 1581 show the growth of his collection to its full glory; they reflect Plantin's sojourns and acquisitions in Paris, his association with the famous family of Venetian printers, the van Bomberghens, his relations with Robert Granjon and with the punch-cutting school at Ghent. The inventories of 1589-90 were drawn up at Plantin's death; they show little change in the collection since 1581 and record its distribution between the 2. Hendrik van den Keere the Elder and Younger were father and son. They both used also the French form of their name, Henri du Tour. The elder was a Ghent schoolmaster and printer, the younger a Ghent typefounder and punchcutter. The known historical facts on each are summarized in Harry Carter's articles listed in the previous footnote. De Gulden Passer. Jaargang 38 3 Moretus and the Raphelengius families. Finally the inventories of circa 1612 and 1652 reveal the success of the Moretus branch in buying back piecemeal the entire Raphelengius share, thus reassembling the collection in Antwerp where it has survived the last three centuries virtually intact. The inventories illuminate more than this one collection. Plantin's records show that he traded extensively with Guillaume I Le Bé, the famous Parisian punchcutter and typefounder; comparison between our inventories and the c. 1598 Le Bé Inventory3. reveals striking similarities. Comparison of Plantin's Index characterum and c. 1580 Folio Specimen with the c. 1599 Le Bé-Moretus Specimen shows that Le Bé's Garamont romans and Plantin's were with one exception the same; Plantin's records show that Le Bé provided him with most of them and was in fact the principal source of supply. The matrices which Thomas De Vechter, van den Keere's successor, took to Leyden are important in Dutch printing and some may survive at the Enschedé Foundry in Haarlem and at the Oxford University Press.4. The material that came into the possession of Raphelengius, Plantin's successor at Leyden, had its effect on Dutch printing although virtually all of his punches and matrices were returned to Antwerp when the Leyden office was finally closed c. 1620. The Frankfort Inventories give a glimpse of the activities that must have taken place in that great center of distribution which had such a powerful influence on northern typography in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We have transcribed sixteen inventories compiled between 1556 and 1652 and have included every inventory that bears on the growth of the collection. We have omitted a few sixteenth and seventeenth century lists that were too small or vague to contribute much information and all inventories taken in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries since they contribute little but details on the later management of the collection. We have omitted the well known 1575 Inventory,5. since this is a list of types alone. Where it 3. Full references to this and the following abbreviations are given in footnote 6. 4. See LMA 25, LMA 26, LMA 28, 1580 van den Keere Inventory; LMA 35, LMA 37, post 1581 de Vechter Inventory. 5. Full references to this and the following abbreviations are given in footnote 6. De Gulden Passer. Jaargang 38 4 contributes information of value this has been included in the notes. The inventories are transcribed in a non-diplomatic edition; we have not indicated completed abbreviations or the length of the original lines, but we have given notice of changes in handwriting or additions from another hand by the use of brackets, and of erasures by the use of double brackets. The inventories are arranged in chronological order. We have preceded each inventory by an introduction giving what we know of its date, its author and purpose. We have added in the margins of the text itself the number of the set to which we believe each entry refers: ST and MA prefixing a number refer to sets of punches and matrices surviving in the Plantin-Moretus collection, and LMA and LST to sets of matrices and punches no longer in the collection. We have marked the initial listing of each set by a dot (•) and provided a note immediately following the inventory giving the present number of pieces in each set, summarizing the available information on the face, and giving specimens and books in which it occurs. The references to appearances in books are mainly limited to Plantinian editions and by no means exhaustive. We shall gladly receive any complementary information on this subject. If an entry is questionable or remarkable it is marked with a square (□) and an explanatory note is provided following the initial listing notes. When a set appears for the last time in the inventories it is marked with a diamond () to signify that it should not be expected to occur again, but we have found no note necessary in this case. The complete listing of matrices for the fleurons and Hebrews was made difficult by the vague and general nature of the entries. We have listed only those sets which we have definite reason to believe that Plantin owned. For the sake of completeness, we included the lists of moulds occurring in the inventories, but we have not yet attempted to identify them. Those who are not familiar with the system Plantin and his associates employed in referring to the sizes of their types will find a table immediately following the last of the inventories (appendix I). This is followed by two indexes. The first lists all the sets by number and gives the inventories in which each set occurs (appendix II). The second is an alphabetical list of 16th century De Gulden Passer. Jaargang 38 5 punchcutters followed by the typefaces and sets of punches and matrices that are attributed to them in the inventories (appendix III). The abbreviations which we have used, are listed in the following footnote.6 6 The abbreviations used in this article may be read as follows: Ar: Archives of the Plantin-Moretus Museum (Cf. J. Denucé, Inventaire des Archives Plantiniennes, Antwerp, 1926).