Hendrik van den Keere

Hendrik van den Keere (c. 1540/2 – 1580) was a punchcutter, or cutter of punches to make metal type, who lived in Ghent in modern Belgium.^[1][2][3][4]

Van den Keere's Two-Line Double Pica roman type

Career

 

Van den Keere's Spanish-style "rotunda" Gothic

 

Most of van den Keere's work was for prominent printer Christophe Plantin in Antwerp. His printing office survives as the Plantin-Moretus Museum.

Van den Keere was the son of Ghent printer and schoolmaster Hendrik van den Keere the Elder,^[5] and his career has sometimes been confused with that of his father.^[6] Both he and his father used the name "Henri du Tour" in French.^[1][7][a]

Van den Keere's grandfather had taken over the type foundry of Joos Lambrecht.^[11] In 1566 he took over his father's printing firm, but soon gave up printing and began to specialise in punchcutting.^[12]

From 1568 he worked particularly for Christophe Plantin of Antwerp, who operated a gigantic printing concern by contemporary standards. Van den Keere stayed living in Ghent, up the River Scheldt from Antwerp.^[13][4] He was Plantin's sole typecaster from 1569 onwards.^[14]

Over the course of his career he cut around 30 typefaces.^[11]

Types

Van den Keere primarily cut punches in the textura style of blackletter,^[8] roman type and music type.^[15][16] Shown are some images of van den Keere's types, all from the Plantin specimen of c. 1585.^[17][18][19]

•  
  Large display type cut in wood and cast in sand.^[20]
•  
  Rotunda gothic^[21]
•  
  Textura blackletter^[21]
•  
  Canon Romain large roman type^[21]
•  
  Parangonne Flamande (Flemish-style) textura blackletter
•  
  Grande Musicque music type^[22]

The largest roman types cut by van den Keere had very bold proportions, a high x-height and a dense type colour on the page, much bolder than earlier types in the Garamond style. This style remained popular in the Low Countries after his death; the standard term for it is "Dutch taste" or goût Hollandois, the description used by Pierre-Simon Fournier for it.^{[23][24][25][3][26][27][28]} Hendrik Vervliet has suggested that the goal was to create roman type "comparable for weight with Gothic letters"^[29] at a time when blackletter was still very popular for continuous reading in body text.^[30] His Gros canon was used by Plantin in his 1574 Commune sanctorum, a church liturgy choirbook intended to be readable at a distance by an entire choir.^[31] John A. Lane comments that his roman types "must be accepted as a major innovation...[they] influenced the seventeenth-century Dutch types that in turn influenced types in England and elsewhere"^[32] although Leon Voet felt that they "never quite equaled the elegance of his French models".^[33]

As influences on his types, Lane suggests types by Ameet Tavernier, Robert Granjon and Pierre Haultin,^[32] and Vervliet an earlier type cut by Maarten de Keyser.^[34][35] His body text type in contrast is more similar to earlier French types by the established French engravers such as Claude Garamond and Granjon.^[36][37]

One of the more striking features of van den Keere's largest roman types is considerable variation in proportions to modern eyes: letters like 'n' and 'u' are very narrow while round letters such as 'o' stay near-circular. Digital font designer Fred Smeijers speculates that van den Keere wanted to "make the type economical" with the letters that could be compressed, while at the time it would not be normal to condense the circular letters: "it was to be two centuries" before truly condensed types which condensed all letters.^[31] Smeijers noted that van den Keere's style could not be an accident as he "could work perfectly in the French tradition" when he wanted to, when cutting smaller types.^[31]

Van den Keere also cut a rotunda gothic type, apparently based on Spanish lettering and intended for a book to be sent to Spain,^[21][38] a Civilité and in Lane's view probably a spectacular set of Gothic capitals used as initials with an intricate, interlaced (Dutch: gestricte) design.^{[32][39][40][b]} He is not known to have cut any italic types, which were not popular in the Netherlands during the 1570s.^[41] His largest types were cut in wood and then duplicated by sand casting.^[42]

Besides his own types, he justified matrices (setting their spacing) from other engravers,^[43] cut replacement characters for some of Plantin's types with shorter ascenders and descenders to allow tighter linespacing,^[44] and in 1572 compiled an inventory for Plantin of the types Plantin owned.^[45][46] Van den Keere also owned matrices for type by other engravers, at the end of his life owning three roman types by Claude Garamond, two romans by Ameet Tavernier, and six italics and a music type by Robert Granjon.^[13]

Many of van den Keere's punches, matrices and wooden pattern letters survive at the Plantin-Moretus Museum:

•  
  van den Keere's Grande Musique punches in the Plantin-Moretus Museum
•  
  Grande Musique punches, detail view
•  
  The Parangonne Flamande blackletter matrices
•  
  Demonstration in the Plantin-Moretus Museum of sandcasting from wooden pattern letters.

Legacy

 

Many of van den Keere's materials became owned by Leiden typefounder Arent Corsz Hogenacker, whose premises (seen in 1963) are now a shop. In 1630 he commissioned this statue for the building of Laurens Janszoon Coster, subject of the now-debunked Dutch claim to the invention of printing.^[47]

Van den Keere died young between 11 July and October 1580,^[48] giving him a mature career of only about 12 years, likely as a result of a leg injury he mentioned in his final letter to Plantin.^[11][49] Van den Keere's family were Protestants, and with the capture of Ghent in 1584 by Spanish royal forces van den Keere's daughter Colette (or Coletta) and his son Pieter, who became an engraver and mapmaker, lived in London around the period 1584 – 1593.^[50] There in 1587 at the Dutch Church, Austin Friars, Colette van den Keere married Jodocus Hondius,^[51][52] a mapmaker who was probably also a punchcutter.^[47] Pieter sometimes collaborated with him.^[53][47] All three later returned to the Netherlands; following Hondius's death Colette took over his publishing business.^[50][54]

In 1581, van den Keere's widow sold many of his punches and matrices to Plantin.^[11] Plantin's successors preserved the sixteenth-century materials and records of his printing office, which became the Plantin-Moretus Museum, and a large amount of van den Keere's work survives intact there.^[55][13]

Thomas de Vechter, van den Keere's foreman, also acquired many of his materials from his widow, documented in a surviving inventory.^[39] He moved to Antwerp and then Leiden, establishing a type foundry casting many van den Keere types.^[11] De Vechter's foundry was later taken over by Arent Corsz Hogenacker in stages from 1619 – 1623, and on the closure of his type foundry in 1672 his types reached other Dutch foundries.^[47][39] Matrices for the interlaced capitals ended up owned by the type foundry of Koninklijke Joh. Enschedé.^[39][40]

A close copy of van den Keere's Gros Canon capitals was used in Spain for over a century after his death, with a later copy on two-line great primer size cut by punchcutter Pedro Disses in c. 1686, which remained in use until the late eighteenth century, especially in Andalusia.^[56][57]

Digital fonts

 

Type designer Matthew Carter showing his DTL Flamande typeface, based on van den Keere's Textura^[58]

Digital font designers who have designed interpretations of van den Keere's roman type include Frank E. Blokland whose company Dutch Type Library (DTL) has published revivals of his roman types under the names DTL Vandenkeere and DTL Gros Canon for a display size; DTL Vandenkeere is used in signage at the Plantin-Moretus Museum.^[59][60][61] DTL has also published Flamande by Matthew Carter, a revival of his textura.^[58][62] In 2016 Blokland received a doctorate on the spacing and proportions of early metal type, including van den Keere's, from Leiden University.^[63][64]

Kris Sowersby, whose Heldane typeface is based on van den Keere's work, describes it as "dense, sharp and powerful...I love van den Keere’s texturas. I can feel the influence of them within his roman forms: they’re both narrow, dense and sharp".^[30] Hoefler & Co.'s release notes for its Quarto typeface describe van den Keere's Two-Line Double Pica display-sized roman (shown above; size is around 42pt)^[65] as "an arresting design marked by striking dramatic tensions";^[66][26][27] designer Sara Soskolne has said that she was attracted to "its crispness, its drama" but noted that they removed details such as the wide horizontal of the centre bar of the 'E' which she felt did not work.^[67]

Fred Smeijers, whose TEFF Renard typeface is based on his work, felt that basing a typeface on his work produced a "solid and sturdy variant of the Garamond style"^[68] and that he was "one of the first to make roman display types that were explicitly conceived as such."^[69][70][71]

Notes

1. He has also been called "Hendrik van den Keere the Younger" or "Hendrik (II) van den Keere"; he is not the same person as the early 16th-century engraver Hendrik Pieterszoon Lettersnijder (Dutch for Letter-Cutter).^[8][9][10]
2. There is a reproduction in Charles Enschede's book; see link.

References

1. Devroye, Luc. "Hendrik van den Keere". Type Design Information. Retrieved 29 July 2020.
2. Neil Macmillan (2006). An A-Z of Type Designers. Yale University Press. p. 124. ISBN 0-300-11151-7.
3. Shaw, Paul (2017). Revival Type: Digital Typefaces Inspired by the Past. Yale University Press. pp. 36, 70–74. ISBN 978-0-300-21929-6.
4. Middendorp 2004, p. 18.
5. Briels, J. G. C. A. Zuidnederlandse boekdrukkers en boekverkopers in de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden omstreeks 1570-1630 : een bijdrage tot de kennis van de geschiedenis van get boek. B. de Graaf. p. 336. ISBN 9789060043233.
6. Laveant, Katell (10 March 2018). "Imprimeur, libraire, éditeur, traducteur, auteur : Hendrik van den Keere, polymathe du livre à la Renaissance". Société bibliographique de France. Retrieved 30 July 2020.
7. Keuning, Johannes (1960). "Pieter van den Keere (Petrus Kaerius), 1571–1646 (?)". Imago Mundi. 15 (1): 66–72. doi:10.1080/03085696008592179.
8. Enschedé, Johannes; Lane, John A. (1993). The Enschedé type specimens of 1768 and 1773: a facsimile ([Nachdr. d. Ausg.] 1768. ed.). Stichting Museum Enschedé, the Enschedé Font Foundry, Uitgeverij De Buitenkant. pp. 29–30 etc. ISBN 9070386585.
9. Hoefler, Jonathan. "His Name Was Almost Legion". Hoefler & Co. Retrieved 13 August 2020.
10. Vervliet, Hendrik D. L. (19 December 2013). Post-Incunabula en Hun Uitgevers in de Lage Landen / Post-Incunabula and Their Publishers in the Low Countries: Een bloemlezing gebaseerd op Wouter Nijhoff's L'Art typographique uitgegeven ter gelegenheid van het 125-jarig bestaan van Martinus Nijhoff op 1 januari 1978 / A selection based on Wouter Nijhoff's L'Art typographique published in commemoration of the 125th anniversary of Martinus Nijhoff on January 1, 1978. Springer. p. 142. ISBN 978-94-017-4814-8.
11. Lane 2004, p. 41.
12. Blouw, Paul Valkema (7 June 2013). Dutch Typography in the Sixteenth Century: The Collected Works of Paul Valkema Blouw. BRILL. p. 899. ISBN 978-90-04-25655-2.
13. Carter 2002, p. 97.
14. Carter 2002, p. 12.
15. "Hendrik van den Keere (1540-1580), Grande musicque". Museum Plantin-Moretus. Retrieved 29 July 2020.
16. Vervliet 2008, p. 466.
17. Vervliet & Carter 1972, pp. 6–11.
18. Lane 2004, pp. 191–193.
19. [Specimen characterum]. Christophe Plantin. c. 1585. Retrieved 13 October 2022.
20. Vervliet & Carter 1972, pp. 7–8.
21. Vervliet & Carter 1972, p. 8.
22. Vervliet & Carter 1972, p. 11.
23. Mosley, James. (PDF). Institute of English Studies. Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 October 2016. Retrieved 7 October 2016. Although types on the 'Aldine' model were widely used in the 17th and 18th centuries, a new variant that was often slightly more condensed in its proportions, and darker and larger on its body, became sufficiently widespread, at least in Northern Europe, to be worth defining as a distinct style and examining separately. Adopting a term used by Fournier le jeune, the style is sometimes called the 'Dutch taste', and sometimes, especially in Germany, 'baroque'. Some names associated with the style are those of Van den Keere, Granjon, Briot, Van Dijck, Kis (maker of the so-called 'Janson' types), and Caslon.
24. de Jong, Feike. "The Briot project. Part I". PampaType. TYPO, republished by PampaType. Retrieved 10 June 2018.
25. Baines, Phil; Haslam, Andrew (2005). Type & Typography. Laurence King Publishing. p. 67. ISBN 978-1-85669-437-7.
26. "Introducing Quarto". Hoefler & Co. Retrieved 29 July 2020.
27. "Quarto Fonts - Design Notes". Hoefler & Co. Retrieved 29 July 2020.
28. McKitterick, David (28 September 1992). A History of Cambridge University Press: Volume 1, Printing and the Book Trade in Cambridge, 1534-1698. Cambridge University Press. pp. 13–14. ISBN 978-0-521-30801-4.
29. Vervliet 1968, p. 230.
30. Sowersby, Kris. "Heldane design information". Klim Type Foundry. Retrieved 29 July 2020.
31. Smeijers 1999, p. 54.
32. Lane 2004, p. 42.
33. Voet, Leon. The Golden Compasses.
34. Vervliet 1968, p. 64.
35. Carter 2002.
36. Vervliet 1968, pp. 65–66.
37. Smeijers 1999, pp. 54–57.
38. Vervliet 1968, pp. 178–179.
39. Lane, John A. (1995). "Arent Corsz Hogenacker (ca. 1579-1636): an account of his typefoundry and a note on his types Part two: the types". Quaerendo. 25 (3): 163–191. doi:10.1163/157006995X00017.
40. Enschedé 1978, p. 56.
41. Vervliet 1968, p. 74.
42. Enschedé 1978, p. 34.
43. Vervliet 2008, p. 230.
44. Smeijers 1999, p. 57.
45. Vervliet 2008, p. 346.
46. Mosley, James. "Garamond or Garamont". Type Foundry blog. Retrieved 3 December 2015.
47. Lane, John A. (1995). "Arent Corsz Hogenacker (ca. 1579-1636): an account of his typefoundry and a note on his types Part one: the family and the foundry". Quaerendo. 25 (2): 83–114. doi:10.1163/157006995X00053.
48. Middendorp 2004, p. 19.
49. Rooses, Max (1878). "Une lettre de Henri du Tour, le Jeune". Messager des sciences historiques, ou, Archives des arts et de la bibliographie de Belgique: 449–462. Retrieved 1 August 2020.
50. Sutton, Elizabeth (2012). Early Modern Dutch Prints of Africa. Ashgate Publishing. pp. 29–30. ISBN 9781409439707.
51. Leslie Stephen; Sir Sidney Lee (1891). DNB. Smith, Elder, & Company. p. 242.
52. Cust, Lionel (1905). "Foreign Artists of the Reformed Religion Working in London from about 1560 to 1660". Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London: 52. Retrieved 30 July 2020.
53. Hind, Arthur (1952). Engraving in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Part I. Cambridge University Press. pp. 203–204.
54. Davies, Surekha (2017). Renaissance ethnography and the invention of the human : new worlds, maps and monsters (First paperback ed.). Cambridge. ISBN 9781108431828.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
55. Vervliet 1968, p. 67.
56. Cruickshank, Don W. (1982). "The Types of Pedro Disses, Punchcutter". Journal of the Printing Historical Society. 17: 72–91.
57. Cruickshank, D. W. (29 July 2015). "Comedias sueltas: An Introduction". Comedias sueltas. Retrieved 7 July 2021.
58. "DTL Flamande". Dutch Type Library. Retrieved 29 July 2020.
59. "DTL Van den Keere". Dutch Type Library. Retrieved 29 July 2020.
60. "DTL Gros Canon". Dutch Type Library. Retrieved 29 July 2020.
61. Blokland, Frank E. [@ExquisiteFonts] (11 August 2022). "In the illustrious Museum Plantin-Moretus, DTL VandenKeere has been used as a house-style typeface since the mid-1990s. The revival is based on the Reale Romaine by Hendrik van den Keere and the Ascendonica Cursive by François Guyot. One will find it applied throughout the MP-M" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
62. Twardoch, Adam; Carter, Matthew (2005). "Typo Interview: Matthew Carter" (PDF). Typo (18): 27, 31.
63. Blokland, F. E. "On the origin of patterning in movable Latin type: Renaissance standardisation, systematisation, and unitisation of textura and roman type". Leiden University. Retrieved 6 October 2019.
64. Blokland, F. E. "On the Origin of Patterning in Movable Latin Type (blog)". Dutch Type Library. Retrieved 6 October 2019.
65. Vervliet 2008, p. 6.
66. Buchanan, Matthew. "Quarto". Typographica. Retrieved 29 July 2020.
67. Soskolne, Sara (11 December 2015). "An H&Co Double Bill with Sara Soskolne". Vimeo. Retrieved 14 September 2019.
68. Smeijers 1999, p. 59.
69. Smeijers 1999, p. 56.
70. "TEFF Renard". The Enschede Font Foundry. Retrieved 30 July 2020.
71. Burke, Christopher. "Typeface Review: TEFF Renard". Bulletin of the Printing Historical Society: 8–9.

Sources

• Carter, Harry (2002). Mosley, James (ed.). A View of Early Typography Up to About 1600 (Reprinted ed.). London: Hyphen. ISBN 978-0-907259-21-3.
• Enschedé, Charles (1978). Carter, Harry; Hellinga, Lotte (eds.). Typefoundries in the Netherlands, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century: a history based mainly on material in the collection of Joh. Enschedé en Zonen at Haarlem (2nd ed.). Haarlem: Stichting Museum Enschedé. p. 56. ISBN 9789070024130.
• Lane, John A. (2004). Early Type Specimens in the Plantin-Moretus Museum: annotated descriptions of the specimens to ca. 1850 (mostly from the Low Countries and France) with preliminary notes on the typefoundries and printing offices (1. ed.). New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press. pp. 41–42. ISBN 9781584561392.
• Middendorp, Jan (2004). Dutch Type. 010 Publishers. pp. 18–19, 243. ISBN 978-90-6450-460-0.
• Smeijers, Fred (1999). "Renard: an idiosyncratic type revival". Quaerendo. 29 (1): 52–60. doi:10.1163/157006999X00077.
• Vervliet, Hendrik D. L. (1968). Sixteenth-Century printing types of the Low Countries. Houten: Hes & De Graaf. pp. 30–32, 64–67, 178. ISBN 9789061948599.
• Vervliet, Hendrik D. L.; Carter, Harry, eds. (1972). Type Specimen Facsimiles II. University of Toronto Press. pp. 7–11.
• Vervliet, Hendrik D. L. (2008). The Palaeotypography of the French Renaissance: Selected Papers on Sixteenth-century Typefaces. BRILL. pp. 230, 352. ISBN 978-90-04-16982-1.