A look at Plantin

Copernicus, Tiempos, and Martina Plantijn all lead back to one print shop in Antwerp.

By Mark Johnson · Founder, Type.lol · 22 October 2026

A big reason I wanted to make more of these studies and visualizations for Type.lol was the connection between Tiempos, Heldane, and Galaxie Copernicus. Klim calls Tiempos a re-focussing of Galaxie Copernicus through the lens of Times New Roman. Galaxie Copernicus was made by Kris Sowersby with Chester Jenkins, and it started from Plantin, a Monotype typeface from 1913, drawn from a type Robert Granjon cut in 1569.

Sowersby kept going back. Heldane, in 2018, is his alone, and it draws on types by Granjon, Hendrik van den Keere, and Simon de Colines. Martina Plantijn, in 2023, is named after Plantin’s second daughter.

Same designer, four roads back. The first one he drew with someone else.

So who was Plantin?

A printer. Christophe Plantin never cut a letter. He trained as a bookbinder, set up as a printer in Antwerp, and bought type from the people who did cut it: Granjon, van den Keere, and some of Claude Garamond’s punches when they were sold off after his death in 1561.

His firm kept everything. The shop is the Plantin-Moretus Museum now, and it holds the only major 16th-century collection of punches and matrices that survives intact. That’s why the story can be told at all.

Then where does the typeface come from?

In 1912 Frank Hinman Pierpont of Monotype went to the museum and found Granjon’s Gros Cicero. Plantin came out the next year, named after the printer rather than the punchcutter.

Stanley Morison used it as a starting point for Times New Roman in 1932, which is how Tiempos gets to go back through Times and arrive in the same place. Galaxie Copernicus was originally released through VLLG, and it doesn’t have the “Galaxie” part of the name any more. That was dropped for version two in 2013. Copernicus is now sold by Labor and Wait.

And Granjon?

He worked in Lyon, Paris, Antwerp, and Rome, and he cut far more than romans: a Civilité in 1557, then Armenian, Syriac, Cyrillic, and Arabic for the Medici press near the end of his life.

His italics travelled furthest. They’re the italic half of Sabon, Adobe Garamond, and EB Garamond, which is an odd place for one person’s work to end up: inside other people’s names. Garamond has the opposite problem. The types long credited to him in France were Jean Jannon’s, from 1621, and Beatrice Warde worked that out in 1926. Most 20th-century Garamonds copy Jannon.

Who names him now?

Granjon died in 1590. In the type.lol catalogue, nothing names him or Plantin until Historical Allsorts in 1992. Now 14 typefaces from 10 foundries name Granjon directly: Kai Bernau’s Lyon at Commercial Type, Riccardo Olocco’s Zenon at CAST, Dominic Hofstede’s Syllabus, Rui Abreu’s Chassi, Heldane, and Roberte, which Eugénie Bidaut drew for Bye Bye Binary in 2023 and named after him. When one of them says Plantin, it means the 1913 typeface, not the man.

Typefaces naming Robert Granjon or Plantin, by release year

15 dated typefaces in the catalogue name Robert Granjon or Plantin, oldest first.

What none of this says is how close any of them are. Lyon and Roberte both name Granjon, and nobody would mistake one for the other. Heldane names three punchcutters in one breath, which is probably nearer to how anyone actually draws: a few references, and then a lot of work that isn’t any of them.

These studies are fun to create because the work always has a reference, but just what that is and how it’s connected can be hard to pin down. But if you look at what each foundry wrote down, who bought whose punches, what tools were used, and so on, you can find a lot of interesting connections. And in a nice kind of yin and yang sort of relationship, this study has helped inform the design and development of our new historical entity pages, and the historical entity pages have helped push these studies.

How we know this

A reference is a typeface or person named on the citing foundry’s own pages, extracted and not checked one by one. It says the foundry named something. It doesn’t say the new design descends from it.

A typeface counts here if it names Robert Granjon or Plantin. Plantin is credited to Granjon because Monotype’s 1913 face was cut from his Gros Cicero of 1569, and a typeface naming both counts once. Active typefaces only. Dates for the people and their own work come from the sources linked in our research notes, not from the catalogue.

Read the full study on Type.lol · All studies