Fontana Press

In 1994 graphic designers Geert Setola and Joep Pohlen had the idea to start a publishing house. Geert was teaching at the academy of art St. Joost in Breda, The Netherlands. His friend and colleague at St. Joost was type designer Chris Brand. During conversations with Chris Brand but also with his French friend Pierre Bernard, who was one of the founders of the French design firm Grapus and also teacher in Paris, he spoke with them about the lack of a typographical handbook for teaching students the basics about type and typography that also addressed digital type, both in the Netherlands and in France.

As a result Geert and Joep decided to write that typographical handbook and to publish it by themselves. Geert proposed the name 'Fontana' for their publishing house, meaning fountain in Italian but also because it began with the word 'font'. With that also the name for the first book was came up: 'Letter Fountain' ('Letterfontein' in Dutch and 'La Fontaine aux Lettres' in French). Geert grew up in Belgium, a country with two languages, Dutch and French (and a little bit of German). Therefore the decision to publish the book in two language versions was quite obvious. The first edition was presented in 1994 at the 'Mois du Graphisme', in Echirolles, a village near Grenoble in France in the presence of international students and teachers.