Orbis Typographicus · A complete digital facsimile
A project by Joshua Langman

Orbis Typographicus copyright © 1980 by Hermann Zapf & Philip Metzger. Used with permission.
Website text, imagery, and design copyright © 2013 by Joshua Langman.

Orbis Typographicus colophon page

The images on this site are of Philip A. Metzger’s copy of Orbis Typographicus, #15. The pages were scanned at Sarah Lawrence College in the spring of 2013. They have been subtly retouched to correct for digital artifacts, to adjust colors, and to repair defects in the hard copies.

The sketches and correspondence reproduced alongside Philip Metzger’s essay are used courtesy of the RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection. The photographs of the Crabgrass Press shop were taken by Joshua Langman in the summer of 2013.

The website text is set in Georgia, designed by Matthew Carter in 1993. The text in the PDF downloads is set in Aldus, designed by Hermann Zapf in 1954. The “Orbis Typographicus” header is set, as on Zapf’s title page, in Smaragd, designed by Gudrun Zapf von Hesse in 1952.

The site probably looks best viewed in Safari on a Mac.

[On 20 November 2014, this site was revised to support Retina displays and other high-resolution devices.]