The engraver Jean Jannon ranks among the significant representatives of French typography of the first half of the 17th century. From 1610 he worked in the printing office of the Calvinist Academy in Sedan, where he was awarded the title "Imprimeur de son Excellence et de l'Academie Sédanoise". He began working on his own alphabet in 1615, so that he would not have to order type for his printing office from Paris, Holland and Germany, which at that time was rather difficult. The other reason was that not only the existing type faces, but also the respective punches were rapidly wearing out. Their restoration was extremely painstaking, not to mention the fact that the result would have been just a poor shadow of the original elegance. Thus a new type face came into existence, standing on a traditional basis, but with a life-giving sparkle from its creator. In 1621 Jannon published a Roman type face and italics, derived from the shapes of Garamond's type faces. As late as the start of the 20th century Jannon's type face was mistakenly called Garamond, because it looked like that type face at first sight. Jannon's Early Baroque Roman type face, however, differs from Garamond in contrast and in having grander forms. Jannon's italics rank among the most successful italics of all time – they are brilliantly cut and elegant.

This family was inspired by a font carved circa 1590 for a Polish editor. We don't know who was the punchcutter, nor the printer's name. We have added the special East European diacritics (Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Sorbian )as the original font has only the Polish accents. It is a Garamond type, like our 1592 GLC Garamond or 1589 Humane Bordeaux, rough and a little approximate, but attractive. We recommend using OTF version with Windows Vista, providing a best compatibility.

This font was inspired by Claude Garamond antique. The original set of letters from 16th century is enlarged by several characters that were not in use in that time.