Jean Jannon

Jean Jannon (1580 – 20 December 1658) was a French Protestant printer, type designer, punchcutter and typefounder active in Sedan in the seventeenth century. He was a reasonably prolific printer by contemporary standards, printing several hundred books.

Career Jannon began his career as a printer, first attested in Paris, where he apparently worked for the Estienne family in his early career, and then in Sedan. He mentions in one preface of hearing of the early history of printing in Mainz, so possibly he served an apprenticeship in Germany.

Jannon married first Anne de Quingé, who died in 1618. Two years later he married Marie Demangin, who had had left her husband. A report from the Council of the Reformed Church of Mainz confirming that the remarriage was acceptable described as her former husband's conduct as a proven series of "adulteries, polygamies and debaucheries".

After working in Paris Jannon established a career as printer for the Protestant Academy of Sedan in what is now north-eastern France. Sedan at the time enjoyed an unstable independence as a principality at a time when the French government had conceded through the Edict of Nantes to allowing a complicated system of restricted liberties for Protestants. He also established a second career as a punchcutter, in his thirties by his report. In 1640 he left Sedan and returned to Paris.

In 1640, Jannon left Sedan for Paris to take over the press of his son, who had recently died.

Following his death, the printing-office at Sedan continued in operation; his family gave up his type foundry in 1664. It was reported to been taken over by Langlois in Paris, although Abraham van Dijck in the 1670s said he intended to buy matrices from Sedan so (if his information was not out of date) some materials might have remained there.

Types Jannon type specimen of their Caractères de l'Université. Sedan, 1621. Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris Jannon engraved decorative material, signed with an II monogram.

Jannon's typefaces are based on the style of the previous century, especially the roman. Some differences in the roman are his characteristic 'a' with a curved bowl and the top left serifs of letters such as 'm' and 'p', with a distinctive scooped-out form. His italics are more distinctive and eccentric, being steeply slanted and with very obviously variable angle of slant on the capitals. Opinions on the aesthetic quality of his type has varied: Warde thought it "so technically brilliant as to be decadent...of slight value as a book face", H. D. L. Vervliet described it as "famous not so much for the quality of the design but as for the long-term confusion it created" and Hugh Williamson considered his type to lack the "perfection of clarity and grace" of the sixteenth century, although many reproductions of his work were certainly popular in printing in the twentieth century. Despite the purchase, it is not clear that the office ever much used Jannon's type: historian James Mosley has reported being unable to find books printed by the Imprimerie that use more than a few specific sizes of italic, although "it is not easy to prove a negative". By the mid-nineteenth century, Jannon's matrices formed the only substantial collection of printing materials in the Latin alphabet left in Paris from before the eighteenth century. The attribution came to be considered certain by the Imprimerie's director Arthur Christian. Doubt began to be raised by historian Jean Paillard in 1914, but he died in the First World War soon after publishing his conclusions and his work remained little-read.

Several early revivals of Jannon's type were made under the name of 'Garamond'. (Warde at the time believed that the raid in Caen had been the source of the Imprimerie's types, since at the time the purchase order was not known.) She noted in later life that her readers were surprised to see an article supposedly by a Frenchman quoting The Hunting of the Snark. A former librarian at American Type Founders, she had been privately told by the company's archivist Henry Lewis Bullen (perhaps aware of Paillard's work) that he doubted his company's "Garamond" was really from the sixteenth century, noting that he could not find it used in a book from the period.

Caractères de l'Université

Jannon's specimen survives in a single copy at the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris. (Mosley notes that J.B.) Brincourt, Jannons's main French biographer, wrote a description of his specimen that does not match the known copy, but if he had seen "another and a more complete copy of the specimen" its location is not known.