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For northern Europeans, texturas remained the most popular form of typeface design until the invention of the fraktur style in Nuremberg.Mariage is heavily classicized sort of Old English type. Italian printers stopped using them around 1470. Continental printers had been printing with textura style letters since Gutenberg's invention of the printing press fifty years earlier. The Old English style is a subset of blackletter type that dates back to 1498, when Wynken de Worde introduced textura style printing to England.
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Their forms often print large amounts of ink upon the page, creating text that leaves a heavy, black impression. These letters, called gebrochene Schriften, or "broken type" in German, are normally elaborately bent and distorted. The term blackletter refers to typefaces that stem out of the historical printing traditions of northern Europe. Mariage, which has been sold under a plethora of different names during the last century, is a blackletter typeface belonging to the Old English category. Morris Fuller Benton, the principal designer of the American Type Founders, designed Mariage in 1901.
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