Manuale Tipografico (1788)
Giambattista Bodoni, director of the royal press at Parma, issued this Manuale Tipografico in 1788 to show his types size by size.
What it is
Giambattista Bodoni, director of the royal press at Parma, issued this Manuale Tipografico in 1788 to show his types size by size. This copy lacks its title page and the first fifty showings: it runs from No. 51 to No. 100, with a Frankfurt bookseller's letter of 1877 tipped in at the front. Each showing takes one page: an engraved tablet with the number, then a short gazetteer entry on an Italian town, the name in roman and the description in italic, set small and high on a wide white leaf. Every town appears twice, in Italian with a number such as 57 and in French with a roman numeral such as LVII. The entries run from Urbino, Norcia and Bergamo through Bari, Carrara and Palermo, and shrink as the type grows, until the last page holds a few words: Saluzzo, Bodoni's birthplace, his beloved homeland.
Why read it now
The method is the lesson. Bodoni keeps the text, the layout and the margins fixed and changes only the type size, so the reader compares one variable at a time and a weak size shows at once against its neighbours. Product pages that show one item in every colour on the same background use this logic, and Nielsen Norman Group's advice on comparison tables agrees: keep each attribute in the same place so differences stand out. The white space frames the type: a small block on a large page tells the reader to look at the letters, not read through them. A 2006 study by Pracejus, Olsen and O'Guinn found that white space in ads signals prestige and quality. What has dated: the high-contrast modern face is hard to read at small sizes and on screens, where the hairlines break up, and the town entries are filler with no link to the buyer's work. Use: when a client must choose between tiers, sizes or finishes, show them on one fixed template with the same copy, number each option, and let the difference be the only thing that changes.
Passages worth keeping
Ella è ragguardevole per la disposizione simmetrica delle sue strade.
توصف مدينة شيراسكو بأنها جديرة بالذكر لتناظر شوارعها، وهي جملة تناسب كتابًا قيمته كلها في النظام والتناظر.
L’aria di questa Città è poco salubre.
يقول النص إن هواء المدينة غير صحي، فالمعنى هنا لا يهم، والمعروض هو الحرف لا المدينة.
Bari, Ville très-belle et très-riche d’Italie, au Royaume de Naples Capit. de la Terre de Bari, avec un Archevêque.
النسخة الفرنسية من عينة باري، وفيها حروف بعلامات مثل è وê، فيرى الطابع الحرف يعمل بلغة ثانية ونظام علامات مختلف.
Saluzzo mia amata patria.
آخر العينات وأكبرها تحمل اسم سالوتسو، مسقط رأس بودوني، ويسميها وطنه الحبيب، فيوقّع الصانع عمله دون أن يمدح نفسه.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
Read the original archive.org
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