paragon

A paragon is a body size of metal type measuring 20 points, which in the old point system equals roughly 1/3.6 of an inch or 7.0 millimetres. It sits between great primer (18 point) and double pica (22 point) in the historical hierarchy of type sizes that governed book and newspaper composition from the 16th century until phototypesetting displaced metal type in the 1960s and 1970s. The name derives from the French paragon, possibly from Italian paragone, meaning a standard or touchstone of quality, though its application to this specific size remains obscure.

Paragon was never common in English or American printing houses, which is why the term reads as archaic today. Printers worked with a core set of practical sizes: pica, double pica, great primer, and smaller faces like brevier and minion. Paragon occupied an awkward middle position that offered little advantage over these established measures. Continental European printers, particularly in France and the Netherlands, were more inclined to use intermediate sizes, and paragon appears more frequently in their type foundry catalogues from the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Point System and Type Measurement

The point system itself emerged as an attempt to rationalize type sizes. In 1737, Pierre Simon Fournier in France proposed dividing the typographic line into units called points; the paragon was one of his named sizes. Later, in 1872, the American point system standardized one point at 1/72 of an inch, making paragon exactly 20/72 inches. This American standard eventually dominated global printing, but many of the old named sizes like paragon faded from use as printers adopted numerical designation instead.

Metal type comes as a complete piece of type high (typically 0.918 inches in depth of impression), with the letter cast on top of a metal body. The size of the body determined the horizontal spacing and the baseline relationships between characters. A paragon body provided specific spacing properties that suited certain books and pamphlets, though most printers found they could achieve similar results with sizes they already stocked.

Today paragon appears mainly in historical typographical references, antiquarian printing manuals, and museum collections of foundry type. Modern digital typography has eliminated the need for such precise historical naming, since fonts can be scaled to any size electronically. For anyone working with legacy metal type, identification of paragon is primarily academic, useful for cataloguing old composing cases or understanding the contents of a historical print shop.