1. Giovanni Mardersteig is particularly known for founding and running Officina Bodoni, a small press producing high-quality editions, and his typeface Dante.
17 Facts About Giovanni Mardersteig
1. 2.
Giovanni Mardersteig's father was a lawyer and insisted that Hans would study law as well.
3.
Giovanni Mardersteig's grandfather had been a painter, and Hans had already specialized in the history of art during his university years in Vienna.
4.
Giovanni Mardersteig returned to Germany later in 1917, joining the publishing house of Kurt Wolff, first in Leipzig and later in Munich, where he supervised production and edited art books.
5.
Giovanni Mardersteig founded and edited the publisher's short-lived art magazine of only six issues, Genius: Zeitschrift fur alte und werdende Kunst, together with Carl Georg Heise and Kurt Pinthus from 1919 to 1921.
6.
Giovanni Mardersteig developed in particular an interest in the famed engraver Giambattista Bodoni.
7.
The press, and Giovanni Mardersteig, moved to Verona, Italy, where Mondadori had printing facilities.
8.
In 1936, after he had finished with D'Annunzio's work, Giovanni Mardersteig sojourned in Scotland for a year with the Glasgow-based Collins Cleartype Press, designing the Fontana typeface that would go on to be used in Collins dictionaries.
9.
When northern Italy was controlled by the Nazis in 1945, Giovanni Mardersteig's press printed 200 copies of sonnets against them written by the German author Rudolf Hagelstange who was stationed with the Wehrmacht in the Veneto region.
10.
Giovanni Mardersteig continued his work at Officina Bodoni in Verona, where printing operations were back to normal after the war.
11.
Hans Mardersteig became an Italian citizen in 1946 and officially changed his first name to Giovanni, a name he had used since 1927 when he moved to Italy.
12.
In 1946 Giovanni Mardersteig founded another printing press, the Stamperia Valdonega, in Verona.
13.
Late in life, Giovanni Mardersteig partnered with his son Martino Giovanni Mardersteig.
14.
The last books made under Giovanni Mardersteig's supervision were the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid's Selected Lyrics and sayings of ancient Greek philosophers under the title The Seven Sages of Greece in Italian and English translation.
15.
Giovanni Mardersteig was fluent in many languages, including Greek and Latin.
16.
Giovanni Mardersteig was made Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 1954 and received the Italian Medal of Merit for Culture and Art in Gold in 1962.
17.
Giovanni Mardersteig was an Honorary Foreign Corresponding member of the Grolier Club since 1964, the inaugural recipient of the Gutenberg Prize of the International Gutenberg Society and the City of Mainz, a recipient of the Bodoni Prize of the City of Parma, AIGA Medal, and the Frederic W Goudy Award.