Giambattista Bodoni

Typographic manual of the knight Giambattista Bodoni

Parma, at the widow's, 1818

Bodoni's most complete collection of typefaces, the summa of his creativity, an unequaled monument of typographic science. The typographer worked on it almost all his life, but was unable to finish it: it was printed five years after his death by his widow Margherita Dall'Aglio. Divided into two volumes, the first contains chancellor and English characters and Latin capital letters; the second is composed of Greek, exotic, gothic and Russian characters, as well as a thousand different friezes and characters for music. In total there are 276 different characters, all expressly fused for the work, and a collection of 665 different alphabets.