Beaujon: The Typographic Record by Connor Davenport

Some time ago, Connor Davenport approached us with an offer to collaborate, publishing a typeface through our platform. We’ve long admired his work, in part because he approaches typeface design with great sensitivity and has a good eye for detail. When he proposed the theme of a sort of classical French Renaissance typeface, we didn’t hesitate for a moment. It is a genre that we’ve managed to avoid until now, as we convinced ourselves that our lack of experience meant we weren’t ready to tackle this specific area yet. Nothing like it had appeared in our catalogue before But in this piece, we are not only sharing the story behind the making of this typeface, but more importantly, the fascinating history concealed within its name: Beaujon.

Garamond has come to represent more than a single typeface. It stands as a typographic ideal, associated with elegance, readability, and classical restraint, while simultaneously referring to a lineage of interpretations that extend beyond the work of Claude Garamont himself. As foundries across Europe and America revisited these forms, the name persisted, even when the historical sources behind them remained uncertain or contested. Within this shifting lineage, certain interpretations became especially influential, shaping how designers would come to understand and rework these forms in the twentieth century.

The Typographic Record by Connor Davenport

Beaujon is the culmination of 10 years of work and personal growth in this industry. In 2016, as a senior in college, I came across Deberny & Peignot’s Garamont from 1926, in their specimen book. I still don’t know why I stopped at that page – it could have been the Tim Burton-esque swashes, the razor-like C and G, or drunkenly stumbling g – but all that matters is this single page sparked a decade long project, one that is finally available to the world¹. Although D&P’s Garamont was the catalyst for the project, one of the most expressive and unique interpretations was Fonderie Olive’s Vendôme, which became an important reference for Beaujon². A few years prior, I came across the AIGA logo, typeset in — what I now know to be —Vendôme Italique³, inside a box, aligned a hair to the left. Despite not knowing what this typeface was, the typographic style stuck with me. Maybe it was this lingering curiosity and interest that told me stop on the Garamont page_⁴.

When referencing a typeface name, we use the respective spelling of Garamont or Garamond. If we are referring to the designer himself, the former with a “t” is used. For further reading on this distinction and to decide for yourself, please read James Mosley’s “Garamond or Garamont?” 

When I discovered D&P’s Garamont, I had no idea about the history of this typeface, nor the deep rabbit-hole I could be going down. The same year that Deberny & Peignot published their typeface, Beatrice Warde, under the pseudonym of Paul Beaujon published her article “The ‘Garamond’ Types” in The Fleuron, A Journal of Typography Vol. 5. The article made public the discovery that the caractères de l’Université were incorrectly attributed to Claude Garamont and instead are the work of Jean Jannon. I personally accept her assertion, though some type historians such as the late James Mosely question them with skepticism. Regardless of any doubt surrounding these claims, the name “Garamon[d][t]” became synonymous with the work of Jannon because of the original misattribution at the Imprimerie nationale, so when ATF published their Garamond in 1919, they referenced the caractères de l’Université. Following suit, many other foundries referenced these sharp and expressive letterforms for their own versions and subsequently kept the name “Garamond” as well.

In the 1953 book Tally of Types, Stanley Morison makes an interesting comparison between the work of Jannon and Garamont, where the former “imitate[s] the typographical style, in its purity, of the great masters of the roman letter and to make available to the trade faces that had once been esteemed. The quality of Jannon’s reproduction of his chosen romans is remarkable but it cannot be said to yield anything like a close facsimile — there is a crispness and hardness of line which evokes the spirit rather of Paris than Geneva”. Can Beaujon be seen as a reproduction of Jannon’s reproduction of Garamont’s, which evokes the spirit rather of New York than Paris?

Aside from this brief introduction, Beaujon’s goal is not to investigate the origins — or controversies — surrounding the attributions of Jannon and Garamont’s types, instead this project is an homage to the printing types that influenced my design practice over this past decade and Beatrice Warde’s writing and research.

Beaujon is not a revival of Jannon’s work, and as most modern typefaces do, it attempts to reinterpret the almost four centuries of typographic referential conversations and ideas, for designers and publishers today.

The release of Beaujon also coincides with the 100th anniversary of The Flueron Vol. 5’s publication.

Outro

As part of a broader account of the research that shaped this project, what follows is a fuller account of that discovery and the person behind it (for those who don’t know the whole story).

When the fifth volume of The Fleuron was published in 1926, there was a new unfamiliar name, Paul Beaujon. The name was the pseudonym of Beatrice Warde, a librarian and researcher, from New York City, who adopted the pen-name in order to be taken seriously within the male-dominated industry. Warde devised the French identity deliberately, and later admitted it added a certain ambiguity and “credibility” to the authorship. The “disguise” proved effective enough that colleagues remarked on the authority and clarity of Beaujon’s English. Yet the pseudonym ultimately remains secondary to the significance of the discovery itself, even as it continues to echo in later typographic discourse.

Warde’s research complicated the prevailing narrative. In “The ‘Garamond’ Types”, she notes that a number of typefaces attributed to Garamont were, in fact, the work of Jean Jannon, a French punchcutter working nearly seven decades later. The materials preserved at the Imprimerie Nationale in Paris, long treated as authoritative Garamont originals, were in reality part of this later rendition of his work. The misattribution, once institutionalized, shaped how subsequent revivals were drawn, named, and distributed.

The detective work

Warde had first become intrigued by the question while working as assistant librarian at the American Type Founders Company in Jersey City, where ATF’s historian Henry Lewis Bullen privately told her he suspected these “Garamonds” might not be what we had previously thought. After relocating to Europe in 1925, she examined the primary sources of printed material of Jannon. The types held at the Imprimerie Nationale displayed characteristics consistent with Jannon’s work: technically accomplished, at times unconventional, and distinct from earlier models.

Despite this, the name endured. By the early twentieth century, and continuing into later reinterpretations, “Garamond” had already become detached from a single historical author. Instead, it referred to a lineage of forms shaped as much by Jannon’s interpretation as by Garamont’s original work. This layered history remains embedded in contemporary type design, where references are often indirect, cumulative, and open to reinterpretation.

The woman behind the story

Born in New York in 1900, Warde was raised in a literary environment shaped by her mother, May Lamberton Becker, a prominent critic. Her entry into typography was driven by sustained intellectual interest rather than circumstance. 

The success of the article led to an editorial position at The Monotype Recorder, initially offered to “Paul Beaujon”, when Warde revealed her identity, the offer remained. She would go on to spend the next 30+ years at Monotype, until her retirement in 1960, establishing herself as a central voice in its public and intellectual life, and one of the few women in a senior role within the industry at the time.

The decision to adopt the pen-name was calculated, reflecting an awareness of how authority was perceived and granted. A young American woman submitting to Europe’s leading typographic journal risked being overlooked; a French male scholar did not. 

This sensitivity to perception, to how form determines whether content is acknowledged at all, became central to Warde’s writing. She remains one of the defining voices of twentieth-century typography. Her later essay, “The Crystal Goblet” (1930), articulated a philosophy of typographic transparency: that the form should not distract from the content it carries. If that essay established her theoretical position, the Garamond article demonstrated her method.

Note: In the spirit of Beatrice Warde’s argument, and as a quiet extension of the same concern for typographic transparency, this and all texts in the series are set in Beaujon, designed by Connor Davenport.