emerged: a formal ‘square’ letter used in book styles; a cursive, flowing style for correspondence and everyday use; and a rabbinical script (Rashi script) for religious commentary. The first Hebrew books were printed in Italy in 1475 by immigrants from Germa- ny and France, using typefaces based on the Ashkenazi style. In 1559, Guillaume Le Bé, a skilled craftsman working in France and Venice, became interested in Hebrew script and began manually carving its letter shapes into steel punches, part of the pro- cess of making movable letters for print- ing. He collected script samples and cut 19 Hebrew square and cursive letterforms. Neither Le Bé nor the printers who used his scripts were Jewish: The Most Serene Republic of Venice prohibited Jews from publishing books. (They weren’t printing them just on behalf of Jews, either; He- brew texts were studied by many intellec- tuals and scholars.) It was not until the first decade of the twentieth century that Hebrew script be- gan to see significant changes in form. This was born out of a desire for more ‘secular’ and modern Hebrew typefaces during the rise of the Zionist movement at the end of the nineteenth century, and the reviv- al of the Hebrew language. Jewish society was becoming less and less religious, and Hebrew was becoming a living language again. This meant that many more secu- lar, everyday texts were being printed, and those called for earthly, secular typefac- es—ones that were visually streamlined and shorn of the elaborateness of the let- tering that might appear in a prayer book. TYPEFACES roughly fall into four groups: serif, sans serif, script, and display. Each has a specific use. Serif typefaces, for exam- ple, are used for their legibility: the small TOP, CLOCKWISE, Closeup of two Le Bé Hebrew letterforms from a page of type specimens. He is best known for range of Hebraic typefaces that were used worldwide until the eighteenth century. Jewish scribes used the quill as their writing tool and were influenced by Gothic Latin. Matthew Carter and Scott-Martin Kosofsky made Le Bé Hebrew, inspired by the originals by Guillaume Le Bé. The influence of Le Bé’s typeface can be spotted in modern Hebrew typefaces as seen in the first Israeli Independence Day poster, designed in 1948 by Yohanan Simon.
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