Opera

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Dublin Core

Title

Opera

Description

In A Note by William Morris on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press, he wrote, "By instinct rather than by conscious thinking it over, I began by getting myself a fount of Roman type. And here what I wanted was letter pure in form; severe, without needless excrescences; solid, without the thickening and thinning of the line, which is the essential fault of the ordinary modern type, and which makes it difficult to read; and not compressed laterally, as all later type has grown to be owing to commercial exigencies. There was only one source from which to take examples of this perfected Roman type, to wit, the works of the great Venetian printers of the fifteenth century, of whom Nicholas Jenson produced the completest and most Roman characters from 1470 to 1476. This type I studied with much care, getting it photographed to a big scale, and drawing it over many times before I began designing my own letter; so that though I think I mastered the essence of it, I did not copy it servilely; in fact, my Roman type, especially in the lower case, tends rather more to the Gothic than does Jenson's."

This copy of the works of Virgil is in a lovely Roman type from a Venetian printer working during Morris's favorite period for inspiration.

Creator

Virgil

Publisher

Antonio di Bartolommeo da Bologna (Miscomini)

Date

1476

Type

Book

Citation

Virgil, “Opera,” Book Club of California, accessed March 28, 2024, https://bccbooks.omeka.net/items/show/91.