When Norbert Schimmel introduced the New Hermès Gravograph in 1938, it was accompanied by an uncredited serif with the nondescript name Roman. The first version offered a set of narrow upright capitals drawn with three passes of the engraver – its paths spreading apart and congregating to create contrast. As the company expanded its offering, the original cut earned the name Triple-Line Roman Condensed.Occasionally also Roman Three-Line. The same design was published in France as Romain. The styles are variously labled 3 Line, 3L, or Triple-Line. In later catalogs, the design is offered in additional weights and widths, expanded with a lowercase, and even a bolted-on italic of a different design.
Roman is one of those ubiquitous typefaces that you’ve probably seen a million times before but never really noticed. As substitute for Times New Roman, it become somewhat of an engravers’ default. The similarity is only superficial. Both are derived from the same kind of pen: an expanding stroke that responds to the pressure of the hand, but that is the extent of it.
The starting point of Monokrom’s typeface is the normal width, which, unlike the others, was equipped with a lowercase. The design is mysteriously nuanced, displaying intentional optical adjustments like the overshoot of round characters, and the vertical balancing of complex shapes like “s” and “g”. The flourished ampersand and the crossbar serifs are just delightful. At the same time, the character widths varies wildly, the punctuation is spindly, and the off-kilter “k” and the droopy “R” are quite obtrusive. It is a fair guess that whoever designed this has mimicked their source without really understanding what they were looking at.
Plaque engraved in Roman, possibly in a later French version called Romain UL. Photo: Frode Helland.
Schimmel’s pantographic engraver works by tracing a pattern template as input. The movements are mechanically transmitted to the other end of the machine, where a diamond needle engraves a reproduction. By adjusting the angles of the interlocking arms, the scale of the reproduction is enlarged or reduced. When these pattern templates were first adapted for digital use, the engraving paths were defined in a proprietary format incompatible with regular desktop publishing software.
Monokrom’s Roman offers the first serious digital rendition of the design for desktop use. The new family spans one through four lines, both patterned and engraved, for a total of eight styles. The tooling, which is explicit in the thinnest styles, is gradually obscured as letters gains weight and the grooves overlap. Even if individual letters might appear ordinary at a glance, there is no escaping that off-kilter rhythm of running text.
