As a face, Bem­bo has that look that it’s been around for­ev­er. In fact it’s a 1929 face cre­at­ed by Mono­type with impec­ca­ble cre­den­tials.

Monotype’s Work

Stan­ley Mori­son was attract­ed to 15th Cen­tu­ry Ital­ian print­ing, and cor­re­spond­ed with print­er Gio­van­ni Marder­steig. Oth­er forces came togeth­er at the same time: a reac­tion away from the ​‘mod­ern’ faces that had been dom­i­nant in job­bing print­ing, improved cast­ing process­es through the Mono­type sys­tem, and bet­ter print­ing sur­faces.

…inspired not by writ­ing, but by engrav­ing; not script but sculp­ture.

Stan­ley Mori­son on Bem­bo Roman, quot­ed in a New York Times let­ter.

Bem­bo was reviewed in The Fleu­ron in 1930, com­ment­ing ​“It will be used by the ​‘undis­tin­guished’ as well as the dis­tin­guished print­er, for it pos­sess­es all the virtues in an emi­nent degree; a first-class leg­i­bil­i­ty in its own right, an Eng­lish­ness con­ferred by our use of Caslon for two cen­turies, econ­o­my in a‑z space, ade­quate but not extrav­a­gant ascen­ders and descen­ders, agree­able vari­ety thicks and thins, a per­fect grace in com­bi­na­tion and, above all, a due capac­i­ty for enlarge­ment.”

This com­ment on ​‘undis­tin­guished’ print­ers prob­a­bly relates to the over­all pop­u­lar­i­ty with small job­bing print­ers pro­duc­ing sin­gle-page work as well as book print­ers. Print In Britain rec­om­mend­ed Bem­bo as a core face for what they called Class C Print­ers — those tak­ing on mul­ti-colour and more ambi­tious job­bing work.

Mono­type­’s work was painstak­ing, and the over­all approach was to cut and tri­al select­ed char­ac­ters mak­ing sure the over­all impres­sion was right before com­mit­ting to the full set of char­ac­ters for the matrix. A ref­er­ence in the Jour­nal of the Print­ing His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety (2001) sug­gests this was an iter­a­tive process and Mono­type­’s works in Sur­rey would re-make the punch­es over and over again until the results were sat­is­fac­to­ry.

The com­pan­ion ital­ic to what was now Mono­type Series 270 was ini­tial­ly designed by Alfred Fair­bank, but it was found this ital­ic did not har­monise well with the roman face. The even­tu­al ital­ic was based on the cal­li­graph­ic writ­ing of Tagliente.

Historical Basis

The face was ini­tial­ly cut by Francesco Grif­fo, a punch­cut­ter — a key stage in cre­at­ing type — from Bologna, Italy. This was used by the Venet­ian print­er Aldus Manu­tius for a book by Pietro Bem­bo in 1495.

This mod­el of a face was influ­en­tial in France from the 1530s and act­ed as inspi­ra­tion for punch cut­ters like Claude Gara­mond.

In Use

The 1948 exhi­bi­tion ​‘Fifty Books of the Year’ showed one in five were using Bem­bo, giv­ing an indi­ca­tion of the appeal in book work.

In his Mono­type Recorder arti­cle, Some Obser­va­tions of a Small Print­er, Will Carter sug­gest­ed that two ver­sa­tile fam­i­lies of type would be need­ed and com­mends Bem­bo as ‘…with­out ques­tion the finest roman of them all.’ This was sup­ple­ment­ed by Wal­baum and dis­play faces.

There was a rec­om­men­da­tion, too, that Bem­bo was a good face for foil block­ing work: the basis of the type in six­teenth cen­tu­ry print­ing means the design was intend­ed for a heav­ier impres­sion and con­se­quent thick­en­ing of strokes on a blocked book cov­er.

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Location

Mono­type Works is used: Sal­fords, Sur­rey

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Head­er Image: ​“Bem­bo type­face” by Speck­led Jim is marked with CC BY-NC 2.0.