“Claude Garamond was the first punch cutter to work independently of printing firms. His roman typefaces were designed with such perfection that French printers in the sixteenth century were able to print books of extraordinary legibility and beauty. Garamond is credited, by the sheer quality of his fonts, with a major role in eliminating Gothic styles from compositors’ cases all over Europe, except in Germany. . . .
Around 1530 Garamond established his independent type foundry to sell to printers cast type ready to distribute into the compositor’s case. This was a first step away from the “scholar-publisher-typefounder-printer-bookseller,” all in one, that began in Mainz some eighty years earlier. The fonts Garamond cut during the 1540s achieved a mastery of visual form and a tighter fit that allowed closer word spacing and harmony of design between capitals.”

—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.