Giambattista Bodoni

Friezes and capital letters engraved and cast by Giambattista Bodoni director of the Royal Printing House

In Parma, in the printing house itself, 1771

It is the first sample of characters engraved and cast by Bodoni, who here is strongly affected by the influence of the French typographer Fournier, but recognizes it openly. It contains a large autobiographical premise of the printer which tells of his typographical ancestry and his original propensity for the characters of the English Baskerville, then oriented towards those of Fournier. He declares that he wants to continue «without delay to complete the entire series at a necessary printing house; and having completed the Latin and Greek characters according to their different gradations, we will put care and effort into forming the most used oriental alphabets». Furthermore, the typographer discusses the shape of the characters and their history and finally claims the primacy achieved by his new foundry over the others existing in Italy.