Greek Week ‘08, day one

Today, our “Greek Week” began. For the next few days, we’ll be drawing Greek letters, and trying to understand how and why they fit together the way they do. By Friday, we should even be digital; it’s Tuesday night, and that still seems a long way away. “Greek Week” seems to be something of a tradition among Reading typeface design students; I remember seeing blog posts and flicker traffic about the class of ’07’s experience with it last year. So far, this is our third Non-Latin workshop: toward the end of 2007, we had session on both North and South Indian scripts. No time is wasted here… next week, our Arabic workshop will begin.

Course director Gerry Leonidas (pictured above) collects various items from Greek typographic history, and we got to see a sample of his collection as a way to kick off the workshop. That was the morning. During the afternoon, we spent a good hour or so photographing it profusely; I’m sure that flickr’s pipes are busting with Greek type things at the moment. Below are just a few of my favorites from my many photos…

This is a very old, very small book. It is set in a very early Greek typeface.

Here is a close-up of a page from the book in the previous image.

This tome is a real Estienne book, set with Garamond type. Damn!

Oh… tempt me more… sweet, sweet Garamond…

The Latin from the column next to that Greek above.

Columns, columns, columns! From left to right: Italic type, then Greek and Roman. From Missa Apostolica, printed by Plantin’s operation in the Low Countries (1589).

Close-up of a page from an Oxford New Testament set with Baskerville’s Greek.

An Upright Greek styple, from the Didots in France.

An Inclined Greek style. from a 19th century book published in Leipzig.

Now for the 20th century: Nebiolo Eurostile Greek.

All of my Greek Week photos are in this devoted flickr set.