File talk:Garamond Great Primer Italic from Tetrasticha.jpg

Reasons for crop

So I've decided to slightly crop this image. I thought I'd better explain this. I got the attribution from H. D. L. Vervliet's French Renaissance Printing Types: a Conspectus, which also shows a character set assembled from photographs of this book. It's an abbreviated book (it's written by an 86-year-old, so we're lucky to have it) but here's what it lists: first, there's a c. 1599 specimen by the Le Bé type foundry (not available to my knowledge out of copyright) attributing the type to Garamond. (Le Bé bought up Garamond's foundry; their identifications are considered trustworthy and are borne out by other sources where they can be checked.) Vervliet shows a character set assembled from this book, so I decided to use an image from the book too: it's the largest italic attributed to Garamond, so looks good from a Google Books image.

However, two things concern me: first, Vervliet's first documented use of the type is in 1566, after Garamond's death by 5 years. This book, in 1584, uses a large range of swash capitals. (I haven't been able to see the 1566 book, Larmes sur...René de Lorraine.) This is the only Garamond italic with a large inventory of swash capitals, but the (small) surviving Le Bé specimen doesn't use them. Vervliet shows them in the assembled character set, and clearly considers them to be likely Garamond's, but out of an abundance of caution I've decided to crop to a section of text that doesn't use the swash capitals. (Vervliet discusses the type in a 1999 journal article; there's also an inventory of the Le Bé foundry that might comment on this. Given the coronavirus situation, neither is something I'm in a position to access right now.) My concern is basically the possibility that the swash capitals-maybe the sloped ones too-were added after Garamond's death by another engraver (which could explain the type only appearing after his death, maybe it was unfinished) and wanting to be hyper-cautious in what I put on Wikipedia and can't check for myself. Blythwood (talk) 20:56, 24 July 2020 (UTC)