Giambattista Bodoni was born in Saluzzo in 1740 into a family of printers. As a young man in 1758, he moved to Rome, where he worked in the printing works of the Congregation of Propaganda Fide founded in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV, specialising in the production of books in foreign languages (from Greek to Latin, Bulgarian, Armenian, Persian and many others) that would help missionaries in their travels to spread the doctrine of the Catholic Church throughout the world. For health reasons, he returned to Saluzzo and in 1768 he was called by Duke Ferdinand to direct the Royal Printworks in Parma, where he was finally able to fully demonstrate his talent and convince the duke to set up a type foundry in the ducal palace of the Pilotta.

The first highly successful work composed with typefaces engraved and cast by him was the Epithalamia exositicis linguis reddita of 1775, in twenty-five exotic languages, which followed shortly after the typographic manual, Fregi e majuscole incise and fuse by Giambattista Bodoni of 1771.

In Parma, Bodoni was the promoter of a multitude of occasional compositions and elegant editions of classics, as well as the famous edition of the Oratio Dominica published in 1806 in memory of Pope Pius VII’s trip to Paris to attend the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte. The work, dedicated to Eugene de Beauharnais, contains the translation of the Lord’s Prayer into 155 languages and is the largest repertoire of typefaces ever published up to that time. Each page is a work of supreme elegance and typographic architecture, and the succession of characters from languages that were almost unknown in Europe at the beginning of the 19th century adds to the enchantment of this unique book.

Bodoni’s editions were a huge success due above all to their quality: wide margins, never stingy line spacing, and airy spacing between words increase readability. The composition is mainly based on black and white, on the alternation of the different character bodies, with the near absence of colour and illustrations. Members of the European aristocracy, collectors, scholars demanded his books because of the quality of the paper, elegance of the pages and the extreme care in printing.

But Bodoni’s real legacy, his magnum opus, was the Typographic Manual, which was only finally published in 1818 by his widowed wife Margherita (1813).