Stempel Garamond

Stempel Garamond was first issued by the Stempel foundry almost a hundred years ago as Garamond-Antiqua. It was—and remains—one of the more faithful and attractive revivals of the Garamond typefaces. There have been a number of versions since, clones, reissues, digitalizations. One of the better known would be the free URW++ Garmond No.8, which may be found readily online. It is ‘almost’ an open license font; a publisher needn’t worry about using it for print or embedding it in a PDF. I see it pretty much as a publisher’s starting kit, dependable and usable for pretty much any project.

Incidentally, its italics are based on ones actually designed by Claude Garamond, where many other Garamond typefaces use italics by Robert Granjon, a respected successor of Garamond.

The Garamond Original typeface—a name used by both Bitstream and SoftMaker—is essentially a clone of Stempel. As with Garamond No.8, they lack opentype features for those who want or need them, though SoftMaker does offer separate small caps. That makes up for much. The typeface is included in SoftMaker’s MegaFont collection, which remains a rather good deal.

Not surprisingly, various opentype projects based on Garamond No.8 have popped up over the last couple decades but none have seemed to go much of anywhere. Be that as it may, the versions that are available are quite viable alternatives to commercial Garamonds or the popular EB Garamond and other open license Garamond (or Garamond-like) fonts. Stempel Garamond, under whatever name, is a good choice for anyone producing books.

We have used versions in all Stephen Brooke’s fantasy novels set among the Mora (the Malvern Trilogy, the Mora Trilogy, etc). We are entirely likely to use Stempel again in books to come. Indeed, we consider it our default for novels.