The Way of the Reconstruction

The stages of the work undertaken by Atlantisz Publishing House are as follows:

• Finding surviving original copies of the books; processing them photographically, and analysing them in terms of their typography.

• Carrying out the complete typographical reconstruction, redesign, and recomposition of both the individual letters and the printing style of the books as a whole; in essence, composing a typeface that is both old and new at the same time.

• Taking the work of Miklós Kis as our starting point and creating a printing style that meets modern typographical requirements.

• Digitizing the output of that work.

• Writing the history of the typeface Miklós Kis created for Florence and publishing it in several languages.

• Publishing new books printed in the recomposed typeface.

We launched the project in 2017. We first had to find a surviving copy of the old book we had chosen as our starting point. It was waiting for us in a second hand bookshop in Rome. We approached Róbert Kravjánszki, our friend and a member of the editorial office of our one-time social science journal Medvetánc (Bear Dance), asking him to revive and reconstruct the type and the printing style, as well as to update them to meet modern requirements. After years of hard work dedicated to the analysis and recomposition of the letters and the logic of their interrelationship, a new type was born on the basis of the 1688 letters of Miklós Kis: Atlantisz Antiqua®.

In 2018, we presented Magalotti’s book and our first results at Atlantisz Book Island (Atlantisz Könyvsziget) to select guests from Hungary and abroad. Our thanks are due to our excellent typographer and all our friends – especially Peter Sötje and the Goethe-Institut – on whose help we could count in this project.

This Latin type of majestic beauty – two fonts of which, Atlantisz Antiqua Roman® and Atlantisz Antiqua Italic®, now enjoy international legal protection – demonstrates in the most self-explanatory manner how deeply and inseparably interconnected Europe’s cities and humanist traditions are in the wider context of our shared culture of literacy. Throughout the centuries, the greatest achievements of Europe’s book producers and patrons, scholars and book artists all built on one another and intertwined to form a single cultural fabric.