JOAQUÍN IBARRA Y MARÍN (1725-1785), Spanish printer

Ibarra was born in Saragossa in 1725. In his day his reputation as a fine printer was great throughout Europe. He was appointed Spanish Court printer in Madrid. His masterpiece, a page from which is reproduced alongside this text, is his Spanish/ Latin edition of Sallust (1772), translated by the Infante Don Gabriel Antonio de Borbon, and using elegant fonts produced by Antonio Espinosa. Ibarra died in Madrid in 1785.

In the 1990s, there was a project at the University of Saragossa to reconstruct the fonts used in Ibarra's Sallust. See the links below (Spanish) on the University's website, and download the fonts (TrueType, Postscript), which were used for the text that you are now reading.

• Biographical note (Spanish)
• On how the fonts were reconstructed and digitised (Spanish)
• ftp://ivo.cps.unizar.es/Graficos/Public/Ibarra/PC/
  Anonymous FTP site, from which you can download the fonts in various formats. The parent directory contains zipped archives of the fonts.

Further reading: D. B. Updike, "Printing Types: Their History, Forms and Use" (Harvard University Press, 1922)