RIP Pim Rietbroek

It is a sadness that the first fresh content for our new website should record the loss of a dear friend, but it is also a fitting tribute to a colleague whose efforts contributed so much to some of the work presented here. The Brill types have been called a modern classic, and that they exist at all is in large part due to Pim Rietbroek.

In 2006, I received an email from Pim on behalf of his employer, the venerable Dutch scholarly publisher, Koninklijke Brill. They were familiar with my work on Hebrew and Greek fonts for the Society of Biblical Literature, and wondered if I could help them create a consistent voice and standardised technical implementation for the typography of Brill publications. It was the beginning of a long and enjoyable working relationship between Tiro and Brill—in many ways the perfect client for the kind of work we love to do—, and of a friendship that pierced my habitual solitude and punctuated the past eighteen years with conversations, visits, and travels together.

I’m not sure I ever knew what Pim’s official job title was at Brill, but he described his position as sitting between the authors and editors on the one hand, and the typesetters and production staff on the other, answering queries from both and helping them to input, store, exchange, and display complex texts in a bewildering range of subjects, languages, and writing systems. Like many academic publishers and university presses making the transition from dedicated typesetting systems to desktop digital design and production tools, Brill had struggled to maintain the standards of earlier times. Their publications in the 1990s and early 2000s underwent a distressing decline in the quality of typographic control for which the company had been known for more than 300 years. Getting complex texts onto the page often required a mix of glyphs from different, mismatched fonts—sometimes within a single word—and, absent standardised encodings, the underlying character strings ended up corrupted and unusable for web and ebook editions.

Pim had a vision for what Brill’s typography could be, founded in the company’s heritage of more than three hundred years of publishing, mated to an understanding of modern technologies and methods, and informed by his own love of well-made scholarly books. He was supported in this vision by Brill’s then CEO, Herman Pabbruwe, and tasked with implementing it through the commissioning of a typeface family that would solve the technical problems of production for both print and digital editions and give Brill publications a consistent typographic appearance.

It took almost two years of planning before contracts were signed and work began. During that time, Pim and I were in periodic contact, exchanging glyph set spreadsheets, discussing options for technical implementations of various aspects of the project, and defining a set of working principles to give practical shape to his vision. I quickly came to appreciate his understanding of the technologies, and how readily he grasped the utility of particular approaches. When I whittled down his initial spreadsheet of text entities—identified through a comprehensive search of Brill publications dating back more than a century—to a significantly smaller set of base characters with dynamic mark positioning, he immediately recognised and was pleased by the flexibility of this approach. Over the initial development period, Pim shepherded the project to the launch of the new typeface during a 2012 symposium at the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden, and then continued to catalogue and propose additions and improvements for subsequent updates. He continued to advise the work up to the completion of version 5.00, five months before he succumbed to a long illness in September 2024.

The work gave a shape to our friendship; its rhythms determined the times and places we would meet. Pim loved to travel. Like many people who come from a small country, he was entranced by the scale of North American landscapes, and his favourite way to encounter them was by train. We met often in California, where he would arrive by rail from Boston or Chicago. We explored together the streets of San Francisco and Palo Alto, while he described moments of his latest trip: the way the plains had opened up into endless sky, or the experience of crossing the Sierra Nevada in the early morning.

Books were often present, physically or conversationally. When planning my first visit to the Brill offices in Leiden, I told Pim how excited I was to finally visit the famous antiquarian bookshop at the ​‘Templum Salomonis’. Gently, he informed me that the new owners had decided to restrict themselves to auctions, and the bookshop had recently closed. He then proceeded to describe the shop in such loving detail that I felt I had, in some sense, visited it after all.

The last time I saw Pim, in early March 2024, we were surrounded by books. We were at Brill’s offices in Leiden once more, with his colleague Maaike Langerak, who succeeds him in his role at Brill. On her desk was a tall stack of recent Brill publications, and as I thumbed through them, marvelling at the eclectic range of subjects presented, I was struck also by the extraordinary realisation of Pim’s vision: books and journals on a dozen and more topics, in multiple languages and scripts, presented in a singular typographic voice. Pim sat nearby, enveloped in this extraordinary legacy.

He had visited me for the last time, with Maaike, in October 2023. They were making their way down the west coast so he could introduce her to the contacts he had made, over many years, with scholars, researchers and technologists in and around the Unicode community. On their final day on the island, I took them to S’ul-hween X’pey, the last stand of old growth cedars. As we walked, we chatted at first but gradually grew quiet, moving on listening only to the forest. The trees are massive at their base, straight and tall above, their drooping branches draped in long strands of moss. We stopped briefly by the stream, where the recent rain tumbled over the smoothed rocks, towards the ocean below. These things were in this place before we were born, and remain when we have passed by in silence together.

John Hudson
January 2025