A special thing in this world: the little note at the end of a book about the typeface. Sometimes there are little stories. At the end of Carl Hiaasen’s “Star Island” you find this:
A Note on the Type
This book was set in Janson, a typeface long thought to have been made by the Dutchman Anton Janson, who was a practicing typefounder in Leipzig during the years 1668-1687. However, it has been conclusively demonstrated that these types are actually the work of Nicholas Kis (1650-1702), a Hungarian, who most probably learned his trade from the master Dutch typefounder Dirk Voskens. The type is an excellent example of the infulential and sturdy Dutch types that prevailed in England up to the time William Caslon (1692-1766) developed his own incomparable designs from them.
Composed by Creative Graphics Inc.,
Allentown, Pennsylvania
Printed and bound by Berryville Graphics,
Berryville Virginia
Designed by Virginia Tan
What a tale! Kis, who travels from Hungary to study under Voskens. The conclusive evidence produced by some painstaking type researchers that establishes the true founder, long forgotten.
These stories at the end of stories are like swimming in a river, then hearing on shore the history of the water, the movements of the glacier that the water flows from, the land that it traveled over.
But wait, there's more
This work by MattK is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International