Christoffel van Dijck


Christoffel van Dijck was a German-born Dutch engraver and punchcutter, who engraved, cast and sold metal type. Although his career is poorly documented, he is believed to have been influential in the history of printing and typefounding in the Netherlands.

Early life

Van Dijck was born in Dexheim, in modern-day Germany, to a Protestant family of Dutch ancestry. His father Gilbert Breberenus van den Dijck was a minister. By 1640 he had moved to Amsterdam as a journeyman goldsmith.

Career

Van Dijck changed career to become an engraver of steel punches, the masters used to stamp moulds, or matrices, used to cast metal type. On 1 May 1647 he rented a house in Amsterdam which he set up as a type foundry. He became the most prominent type-founder of his time in the Netherlands, cutting type in roman, italic, blackletter, Armenian, music type and probably printers' flowers. In or shortly before 1655 he drew out lettering for rooms in the Royal Palace of Amsterdam, then the city hall. He was buried in Amsterdam in 1669 and his foundry taken over by his son Abraham.

Work

From a surviving 1681 specimen, historian Paul Shaw explains that van Dijck's aesthetic style is "closer in color and spirit to 16th-century French types such as those by Garamont than to those of his contemporaries, which tend to be darker, narrower, and have a taller x-height."
Understanding of van Dijck's career has been limited by a lack of knowledge of what types he cut: as was common for pre-nineteenth century printing materials a large proportion of his punches and matrices were lost due to changing artistic tastes in favour of "modern face" typefaces, being destroyed from around 1808 by the Enschedé foundry, which had come to own them, at a time when it was also in financial difficulties, although some survive at Enschedé and others in the collection of Oxford University Press. An impressive but jumbled specimen was issued by the widow of Daniel Elsevier in 1681 offering what had been his foundry for sale, of which a copy survives in the Plantin-Moretus Museum of Antwerp, and fragments of an earlier specimen are also extant at Cambridge University Library. A specimen issued by van Dijck in 1668/1669 was found to exist in the National Archives in London by historian Justin Howes; according to Lane as of 2013 it had yet to be published.