Trinité & Lexicon. The Typefaces Designed by Bram de Does
Bram de Does
De Buitenkant, Amsterdam, 2013
€36,75
In 1991 publishers Uitgeverij De Buitenkant and Spectatorpers published a small book entitled Romanée en Trinité. Historisch origineel en systematisch slordig (Romanée and Trinité: historically original and systematically sloppy). I set the Dutch text by hand, using Jan van Krimpen’s Romanée, and printed 500 copies on a Victoria platen press. Drukkerij Jan de Jong (Uitgeverij De Buitenkant’s in-house press) printed the type specimen section in offset.
By 1991 the Autologic phototypesetter had already been phased out, Enschedé having switched to digital typesetting. Fortunately we were able to use the phototypeset positives for the 1982 type specimen. Enschedé had given Peter Matthias Noordzij the job of digitizing Trinité and in the second half of Romanée en Trinité we were able to give a foretaste of the results.
This book contains the full text of Romanée en Trinité, but it was technically impossible to include the hand-set specimen.
The original drawings for Trinité were bought by the Enschedé Museum and in 1999 those for Lexicon were acquired by the Special Collections department at Amsterdam University Library. At their request I prepared an informative dossier, complete with numerous illustrations, entitled ‘De ontwikkeling van de Lexicon’ (How Lexicon was developed). The text of this, too, is included in the present publication, though without the illustrations. The only specimens in this book are the typeset type specimens, in three sizes, of all the available Trinité and Lexicon fonts.
In places, both texts are now out of date. However, they contain many details that were important at the time of the transition from hand setting via phototypesetting to digital typesetting, but which I would now no longer be unable to come up with. For that reason I have left them largely as they were. For the text of the type specimen section we have been allowed to draw on an essay by Frans Janssen from Technique & Design in the History of Printing.
ISBN: 9789490913366
