How many times have I taken the Bus 8 from the Parma train station to the home where my writing group meets, failing to notice the massive, time-dinged Palazzo della Pilotta, the 16th-century palace that houses a disparate collection of museums, archives, state offices, and who knows what else? I certainly didn’t know on those monthly visits that the city bus rumbled past the museum of one of the most important designers, engravers, and publishers in typographic history.

Giambattista Bodoni, although not a son of Parma, spent most of his life here in the 18th and early 19th centuries, flourishing under patronage both temporal and sacred, molding thousands of metal fonts to stamp onto heavy silk or thick white paper, printing an untold number of books, pamphlets, gazettes, journals, flyers, music scores and, in the midst of this activity, creating his eponymous typeface, one of the most recognizable in the art of typography’s relatively short history.

More than 200 years later, timeless Bodoni can be found in the word marks for CBS network, Calvin Klein, Ann Taylor, the South Beach Diet book, and ads for the Broadway hit musical, "Mamma Mia." It is often used for titles in Vogue and other high-style magazines. It makes up the word-mark logo of FMR, the elegant Italian magazine devoted to the arts and created by the designer Franco Maria Ricci, himself a devotee of Bodoni, and, according to the guest register, a recent visitor to the Museo Bodoniano.

Bodoni himself appears as one of those historical figures fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. The son of a printer, he was born in 1740 in a small Piedmont town and came to Parma after an apprenticeship at the Vatican. While in Rome, Bodoni also worked at La Sapienza University, where he learned Oriental and ancient languages and organized their alphabets for typesetting. I mention this detail primarily because it helps the museum visitor or type buff better appreciate how large an outside world he brought to Parma, and how this sophisticated city—sometimes called the Athens of Italy—was receptive to outside influences.

In the museum, you can see carefully constructed pages of Chinese and Japanese characters as well as Greek, Latin, Russian, Arabic, and even Etruscan; in total more than 150 languages and 289 typefaces are represented. Imagine, in an Italian town in the 18th century, resided the ability to create type from the alphabets of the known languages throughout the world. A sample in the museum attests to the intellectual life in Parma. It’s a bilingual dissertation for which Bodoni produced the typeface and printed the ancient Hebrew language for a doctoral student in linguists at the University of Parma.

(Right) The wordmark of the region’s most famous product—parmigiano-reggiano—was perhaps inspired by the one Bodoni created for his royal printing house.

As early as the 1760s, Bodoni was flourishing by royal decree as head of the stamperia reale or royal printing house, and throughout his lifetime, Bodoni was a celebrated artisan, producing various printed pieces for Italian, French, and Austrian royalty and aristocrats, the church and the citizens of Parma as well as exporting his typefaces within Italy and beyond, particularly to France and England. The logo found on most of the documents in the museum underscores the type house’s connection with its patron city. A horizontal oval with encircled letters recalls the famous stamps on today’s parmigiano-reggiano and Parma prosciutto.

Bodoni’s life and times mirror his contribution to the history of typography. He is considered the typographic midwife whose works carried the earlier, heavier strokes created by predecessors such as John Baskerville and William Caslon into a more subtle, modern style still used today. On a larger scale, he emerged from the twilight of the Age of Enlightenment and survived the new republics being spawned throughout Europe. The Bourbonese Duke of Parma was his original patron, but it was under Napoleon Bonaparte that he received a French gold medal in 1806.

Bodoni began his typographic career designing fonts in the high Baroque curlicue style. But his influence spanned into the new era, and he died in 1813, one month after that master of Romanticism, Guiseppe Verdi, who was born in a town near Parma. Bells in the great cathedral of Parma tolled for Bodoni, as if for royalty, and the proclamation—and justification for such a high honor—extolled Bodoni as il re dei tipografi, il tipografi dei rei (the king of typographers, the typographer of kings).

My own relationship with the Bodoni typeface is like that of a long-time but casual lover. Attracted to its looks, but often misusing it for my own selfish purposes, I never truly committed myself to appreciating its finer qualities or analyzed why I invariably reverted to its calming presence when inspiration sputtered away. Not a designer by training, I have nonetheless flirted for more than 30 years with graphics, substituting type for my inability to draw. During my career, I have seen the process emerge from depending on typesetters to completely controlling typography on my laptop. But despite the current ease of producing type, be it for a web press or for the Web, the basic elements haven’t changed much since Gutenberg revolutionized the world by creating moveable type. And designers, typographers, and publishers the world over owe the elements of their profession to the giants in the field, people whose names we still use today: Garamond, Baskerville, Didot, and Bodoni.

I can tell you when I fell in love with Bodoni. I was in San Francisco in the late 1980s when I came across a store named Ann Taylor. It was as if this tiny store—now a huge chain—was built just for me. Too often, corporate images impinge on a designer’s sensibilities. Look at McDonald’s, its ugly golden arches leering beneath centuries-old Italian palazzos. And the design sensibility of Wal-Mart need not be discussed. But Ann Taylor is neither a burger palace nor a discount monolith. And not only did I love its clothes, I also admired its elegant, classic word mark, Ann Taylor, in a squished (technically called compressed) Bodoni, a tasteful navy blue on a white background. This is all I aspired to be: subtle, elegant, classy, and, if I bought these clothes, the typeface implied, I could achieve my goal. Thus began my long, slow dance with Bodoni, a typeface whose origins I only recently discovered.

Although I have the ability to create thousands of pages from thousands of typefaces by the touch of a few computer strokes, the Museo Bodoniani, established in 1963, brings home the physicality of type. Hundreds of drawers line the walls, housing thousands of boxes of type, more than 80,000 individual pieces of metal. Everything from the b-b size ball of metal that marks the end of a sentence to the big capital letters in languages arcane even in today’s polyglottal global village can be found in one narrow, high-ceilinged room.

For every piece of typeface family, Bodoni—or his apprentices—created a single font by chiseling a wooden mold, a mirror image for each letter. Within a given typeface family, he had to recreate one by one, for example, the letter A in point sizes ranging from 8 to 72, in both uppercase and lowercase letter forms. He then poured a molten alloy, usually containing copper, lead, and antimony, waited for it to cool, popped out the hardened letter and placed it in its type box until ready for use. A frame of type was stamped down, hard and even, on a hand-cranked press, its form and function taken directly from agriculture contraptions used to stamp the juice out of fruit. The Italian for the verb print is stampare, and I can think of no other word that more definitively captures the physicality of the act. It was a hot, grimy, tedious business, and for five centuries, this was how printing was done. Even as late as the mid-twentieth century, "ink-stained wretches" was the Dickensian phrase used to describe printers.

And yet, the very element that gives the reader access to the meaning behind the words on a page is the typeface that makes up the words, and it is the only element in the history of printing that remains so directly connected to its past. To access the words in holy scripture, the daily newspaper or the latest best seller, you must first mentally translate the letters you see on a page. And these letters manifest a history of typographical art that can be as ordered or as capricious as the writers themselves. In most cases, the best type is the one that quietly goes about its business, unobtrusive enough that the untrained reader delves immediately into the text without stopping to classify the typeface. The best use of Bodoni typeface is not for body copy but for titles, larger applications such as posters or title pages of books. But this does not mean that the Parma typographer did not have the ability to control all type applications, from the largest display to the tiniest footnotes. Examples of his lyrical blocks of text are found in volumes ranging from Homer, Virgil, and Dante to a legal book on the rights of women.

What makes Bodoni distinct? The most notable element is the extreme thick and thin stroke lines. The letter A represents a perfect example. Rather than giving equal weight to the two long strokes of the A, Bodoni contrasted the stroke lines, a thick one for the right-hand element and an extremely thin or hairline stroke on the left. He manipulated serifs, the little feet at the bottom of a letter or the vertical marks at the end of a horizontal stroke like in the letter F, by making them simpler, more graceful, and ultimately more readable, buon gusto, an art historian called it, armonia and grazia (good taste, harmony, and grace).

To appreciate baptismal fonts, you must visit the famous baptisteries in Florence and Parma. In the same way, devotees of typesetting need to see Bodoni’s fonts in situ. In the museum, the crisp black letters are exquisitely displayed on large folio pieces, the margins ample but precise, the harmony of thick and thin strokes as rhythmically proportioned and rigidly disciplined as any Palladian villa along the Brenta.

(Right) Individual letters in letterboxes display the handcarved thick and thin Bodoni’s work is
known for.

After touring the museum, the visitor comes to the guest book. Like the books and languages represented in the museum, the guests also represent a global perspective, coming from as far as Japan, Mexico, Iran, and Estonia and as near as a local school group. The signatures are unusually well done, often with flourishes, and writ large, as if their writers are conscious of where they are and what they have seen. I carefully add my own signature and provenance: Bologna, Italy, and San Antonio, Texas.

The museum’s web site is: www.mb-museobodoniano.it/museo.htm. Visits are by appointment only, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., Monday through Saturday.