Geoffroy Tory

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Geoffroy Tory

c. 1480-c. 1533

French printer and engraver whose designs in Champ fleury (1529) provided the model for styles of book decoration in the French Renaissance. Typographers long struggled with the problem of developing a formula for the design of capital Roman letters, a question Tory effectively addressed in his seminal work. He advocated a number of other reforms, including the use of accents, the cedilla, the apostrophe, and other punctuation marks, that exerted a profound influence not only on French orthography, but on the French language as it is written today. Champ fleury won such great acclaim that King Francis I appointed him to the position of Imprimeur du Roy in 1530.