“Around 1790 [Giambattista] Bodoni redesigned the roman letterforms to give them a more mathematical, geometric, and mechanical appearance. He reinvented the serifs by making them hairlines that formed sharp right angles with the upright strokes. . . . The thin strokes of his letterforms were trimmed to the same weight as the hairline serifs, creating a brilliant sharpness and a dazzling contrast not seen before. . . . Bodoni’s precise, measurable, and repeatable forms expressed the vision and spirit of the machine age.”

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