Giambattista Bodoni

Giambattista Bodoni (Italian pronunciation: [dʒambatˈtiˑsta boˈdoːni]; February 16, 1740 in Saluzzo – November 30, 1813 in Parma) was an Italian typographer, type-designer, compositor, printer and publisher in Parma.

He first took the type-designs of Pierre Simon Fournier as his exemplars, but afterwards became an admirer of the more modelled types of John Baskerville; and he and Firmin Didot evolved a style of type called 'New Face', in which the letters are cut in such a way as to produce a strong contrast between the thick and thin parts of their body. Bodoni designed many type-faces, each one in a large range of type sizes. He is even more admired as a compositor than as a type-designer, as the large range of sizes which he cut enabled him to compose his pages with the greatest possible subtlety of spacing. Like Baskerville, he sets off his texts with wide margins and uses little or no illustrations or decorations.

There have been several modern revivals of his type-faces, all called Bodoni. They are often used as display faces.

Bodoni’s birthplace is set in the foothills of the Cottian Alps, in what was then Savoy, and is now Piedmont. He was the seventh child and fourth son of Francesco Agostino Bodoni and Paola Margarita Giolittii. His father and grandfather were both printers in Saluzzo, and as a child his toys were his grandfather’s leftover punches and matrices. He learned the printing trade working at his father’s side, and his gift for wood-engraving and printing was evident very early. So was his ambition. At the age of 17 he decided to travel to Rome with the intention of securing fame and fortune as a printer.

In Rome, Bodoni found work as an assistant compositor (typesetter) at the press of the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (The Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples), the missionary arm of the Vatican. Bodoni flourished under the careful supervision of Cardinal Giuseppe Spinelli, the prefect of the Propaganda Fide, and Costantino Ruggieri, the superintendent of the press. One of his first tasks was sorting and cleaning punches in a wide variety of Middle Eastern and Asian languages. Bodoni quickly demonstrated his gift for exotic languages and, as a result, he was sent to study Hebrew and Arabic at “La Sapienza,” (Sapienza University of Rome). Bodoni soon became the press’s compositor of foreign languages, and began to typeset books. Spinelli and Ruggieri were so delighted with his work on the Pontificale Arabo-Copto that they allowed him to add his name and birthplace to subsequent printings. He then began cutting his own punches.

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