Gerald Giampa (March 4, 1950 - June 24, 2009) [1] [2] was a printer, typographer and author.
When Gerald Giampa was born on 4 March 1950, his parents lived in a tent in Duncan, British Columbia. His interest in printing books came from his grandfather, who liked to read. Giampa studied letterpress printing and typography under Wil Hudson and Nick Schwabe [3] in Vancouver.
From 1975 to 1981 Giampa's Cobblestone Press in Vancouver published not only jobbing printing but also works by Ezra Pound, Robin Blaser [4] and George Bowering among others. During this time he chiefly used Caslon type.
Later Giampa expanded his company, renaming it the Northland Letterpress Company, and in 1983 he bought the US Lanston Monotype Machine Company of Philadelphia from M & H typefounders in San Francisco. With the Lanston Monotype Company's stock he acquired much of Frederic Goudy's materials. He and Jim Rimmer adapted these for digital form; and from 1988 to 2004 ran the digital foundry, Lanston Type Company.
In 1994 Giampa moved to Prince Edward Island, but a few years later his stock was destroyed in a storm. The name of his firm, together with its fonts, were bought in 2004 by the digital foundry P22, of Buffalo, NY.
Giampa designed the Bodoni 26 font, which was named in the top 100 Types in a survey conducted by the Type Directors Club. [5]
He died on 20 June 2009 in Vancouver.
Bitstream Inc. was a type foundry that produced digital typefaces. It was founded in 1981 by Matthew Carter and Mike Parker among others. It was located in Marlborough, Massachusetts. The font business, including MyFonts, was acquired by Monotype Imaging in March 2012. The remainder of the business, responsible for Pageflex and Bolt Browser, was spun off to a new entity named Marlborough Software Development Holdings Inc. It was later renamed Pageflex, Inc following a successful management buyout in December 2013.
Times New Roman is a serif typeface. It was commissioned by the British newspaper The Times in 1931 and conceived by Stanley Morison, the artistic adviser to the British branch of the printing equipment company Monotype, in collaboration with Victor Lardent, a lettering artist in The Times's advertising department. It has become one of the most popular typefaces of all time and is installed on most desktop computers.
Matthew Carter is a British type designer. A 2005 New Yorker profile described him as 'the most widely read man in the world' by considering the amount of text set in his commonly used fonts.
Frederic William Goudy was an American printer, artist and type designer whose typefaces include Copperplate Gothic, Goudy Old Style and Kennerley.
In the manufacture of metal type used in letterpress printing, a matrix is the mould used to cast a letter, known as a sort. Matrices for printing types were made of copper.
American Type Founders (ATF) was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85% of all type manufactured in the United States. The new company, consisting of a consolidation of firms from throughout the United States, was incorporated in New Jersey.
Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc., founded as Lanston Monotype Machine Company in 1887 in Philadelphia by Tolbert Lanston, is an American company that specializes in digital typesetting and typeface design for use with consumer electronics devices. Incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Woburn, Massachusetts, the company has been responsible for many developments in printing technology—in particular the Monotype machine, which was a fully mechanical hotmetal typesetter, that produced texts automatically, all single type. Monotype was involved in the design and production of many typefaces in the 20th century. Monotype developed many of the most widely used typeface designs, including Times New Roman, Gill Sans, Arial, Bembo and Albertus.
A type foundry is a company that designs or distributes typefaces. Before digital typography, type foundries manufactured and sold metal and wood typefaces for hand typesetting, and matrices for line-casting machines like the Linotype and Monotype, for letterpress printers. Today's digital type foundries accumulate and distribute typefaces created by type designers, who may either be freelancers operating their own independent foundry, or employed by a foundry. Type foundries may also provide custom type design services.
Caslon is the name given to serif typefaces designed by William Caslon I in London, or inspired by his work.
P22 Type Foundry is a digital type foundry and letterpress printing studio based in Rochester, New York. The company was created in 1994 in Buffalo, New York by co-founders Richard Kegler and Carima El-Behairy. The company is best known for its type designs, which have appeared in films and on commercial products. The P22 Type Foundry retail font collection specializes in historical letterforms inspired by art, history, and science that otherwise have never been available previously in digital form. P22 works with museums and foundations to ensure the development of accurate historical typefaces, and with private clients to create custom bespoke fonts.
Bookman or Bookman Old Style, is a serif typeface. A wide, legible design that is slightly bolder than most body text faces, Bookman has been used for both display typography and for printing at small sizes such as in trade printing, and less commonly for body text. In advertising use it is particularly associated with the graphic design of the 1960s and 1970s, when revivals of it were very popular.
Goudy Old Style is an old-style serif typeface originally created by Frederic W. Goudy for American Type Founders (ATF) in 1915.
Type casting is a technique for casting the individual letters known as sorts used in hot metal typesetting by pouring molten metal into brass moulds called matrices.
Twentieth Century is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Sol Hess for Lanston Monotype in 1937. It was created as a competitor to the successful Futura typeface for Monotype's hot metal typesetting system. Like Futura it has a single-story 'ɑ' and a straight 'j' with no bend.
Bell is the name given to a serif typeface designed and cut in 1788 by the punchcutter Richard Austin for the British Letter Foundry, operated by publisher John Bell, and revived several times since.
Bulmer is the name given to a serif typeface originally designed by punchcutter William Martin around 1790 for the Shakespeare Press, run by William Bulmer (1757–1830). The types were used for printing the Boydell Shakespeare folio edition.
Stephenson Blake is an engineering company based in Sheffield, England. The company was active from the early 19th century as a type founder, remaining until the 1990s as the last active type foundry in Britain, since when it has diversified into specialist engineering.
Jim Rimmer was a Canadian graphic designer, letterpress printer, proprietor of the Pie Tree Press and is especially notable as a designer of typefaces.
Kennerley Old Style is a serif typeface designed by Frederic Goudy. Kennerley is an "old-style" serif design, loosely influenced by Italian and Dutch printing traditions of the Renaissance and early modern period. It was named for New York publisher Mitchell Kennerley, who advanced Goudy money to complete the design. While Goudy had already designed 18 other typefaces, it was one of Goudy's most successful early designs in his own style. The regular or roman style was designed in 1911, the italic in 1918; bold styles followed in 1924.