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Didone () is a genre of
serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ...
typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands o ...
that emerged in the late 18th century and was the standard style of general-purpose printing during the nineteenth. It is characterized by: * Narrow and unbracketed (hairline)
serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ...
s. (The serifs have a nearly constant width along their length.) * Vertical orientation of weight axes. (The vertical strokes of letters are thick.) * Strong contrast between thick and thin lines. (Horizontal parts of letters are thin in comparison to the vertical parts.) * Some stroke endings show ball terminals. (Many lines end in a teardrop or circle shape, rather than a plain wedge-shaped serif.) * An unornamented, "modern" appearance. The term "Didone" is a 1954 coinage, part of the
Vox-ATypI classification In typography, the Vox-ATypI classification makes it possible to classify typefaces into general classes. Devised by Maximilien Vox in 1954, it was adopted in 1962 by the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) and in 1967 as a British S ...
system. It amalgamates the surnames of the famous typefounders
Firmin Didot Firmin Didot (; 14 April 176424 April 1836) was a French printer, engraver, and type founder. Early life Firmin Didot was born in Paris into a family of printers founded by François Didot, the father of 11 children. Firmin was one of his gr ...
and
Giambattista Bodoni Giambattista Bodoni (, ; 16 February 1740 – 30 November 1813) was an Italian typographer, type-designer, compositor, printer, and publisher in Parma. He first took the type-designs of Pierre Simon Fournier as his exemplars, but afterwards be ...
, whose efforts defined the style around the beginning of the nineteenth century. The category was known in the period of its greatest popularity as modern or modern face, in contrast to "old-style" or "old-face" designs, which date to the Renaissance period.


History

Didone types were developed by printers including
Firmin Didot Firmin Didot (; 14 April 176424 April 1836) was a French printer, engraver, and type founder. Early life Firmin Didot was born in Paris into a family of printers founded by François Didot, the father of 11 children. Firmin was one of his gr ...
,
Giambattista Bodoni Giambattista Bodoni (, ; 16 February 1740 – 30 November 1813) was an Italian typographer, type-designer, compositor, printer, and publisher in Parma. He first took the type-designs of Pierre Simon Fournier as his exemplars, but afterwards be ...
and Justus Erich Walbaum, whose eponymous typefaces, Bodoni,
Didot Didot may refer to: * Didot family, family of French printers, punch-cutters and publishers that flourished mainly in the 18th century * Didot (typeface), a group of serif typefaces * the Didot Point (typography) In typography, the point is the ...
, and Walbaum, remain in use today. Their goals were to create more elegant designs of printed text, developing the work of
John Baskerville John Baskerville (baptised 28 January 1707 – 8 January 1775) was an English businessman, in areas including japanning and papier-mâché, but he is best remembered as a printer and type designer. He was also responsible for inventing "w ...
in
Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1.145 million in the city proper, 2.92 million in the We ...
and Fournier in France towards a more extreme, precise design with intense precision and contrast, that could show off the increasingly refined printing and paper-making technologies of the period. (Lettering along these lines was already popular with calligraphers and copperplate engravers, but much printing in western Europe up to the end of the eighteenth century used typefaces designed in the sixteenth century or relatively similar, conservative designs.) These trends were also accompanied by changes to page layout conventions and the abolition of the
long s The long s , also known as the medial s or initial s, is an archaic form of the lowercase letter . It replaced the single ''s'', or one or both of the letters ''s'' in a 'double ''s sequence (e.g., "ſinfulneſs" for "sinfulness" and "po� ...
.Cees W. De Jong, Alston W. Purvis, and Friedrich Friedl. 2005. Creative Type: A Sourcebook of Classical and Contemporary Letterforms. Thames & Hudson. (223) Typefounder
Talbot Baines Reed Talbot Baines Reed (3 April 1852 – 28 November 1893) was an English writer of young adult fiction, boys' fiction who established a genre of school story, school stories that endured into the mid-20th century. Among his best-known work is ' ...
, speaking in 1890 called the new style of the early nineteenth century "trim, sleek, gentlemanly, somewhat dazzling". Their designs were popular, aided by the striking quality of Bodoni's printing, and were widely imitated. In Britain and America, the lasting influence of Baskerville led to the creation of types such as the
Bell A bell is a directly struck idiophone percussion instrument. Most bells have the shape of a hollow cup that when struck vibrates in a single strong strike tone, with its sides forming an efficient resonator. The strike may be made by an inte ...
, Bulmer and
Scotch Roman Scotch Roman is a class of typefaces popular in the early nineteenth century, particularly in the United States and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom. These typefaces were modeled on a design known as Pica No. 2 from the Edinburgh foundry of ...
designs, in the same spirit as Didone fonts from the continent but less geometric; these like Baskerville's type are often called
transitional serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ...
designs. Later developments of the latter class have been called Scotch Modern and show increasing Didone influence. Didone typefaces came to dominate printing by the middle of the nineteenth century, although some "old style" faces continued to be sold and new ones developed by typefounders. From around the 1840s onwards, interest began to develop among artisanal printers in the typefaces of the past. Many historians of printing have been critical of the later Didone faces popular in general-purpose printing of the nineteenth century, especially following the reaction of the twentieth century against Victorian styles of art and design.
Nicolete Gray Nicolete Gray (sometimes Nicolette Gray) (20 July 1911–8 June 1997) was a British scholar of art and calligraphy. She was the youngest daughter of the poet, dramatist and art scholar Laurence Binyon and his wife, writer, editor and transla ...
has described later Didone typefaces as depressing and unpleasant to read: "the first modern faces designed around 1800 and 1810 are charming; neat, rational and witty. But from that time onwards nineteenth-century book types grow more and more depressing; the serifs grow longer, the ascenders and descenders grow longer, the letters crowd together; the normal mid nineteenth-century book is typographically dreary. The Victorians lost the idea of good type to read." Historian G. Willem Ovink has described late nineteenth-century Didone types as "the most lifeless, regular types ever seen". Stanley Morison of the printing equipment company
Monotype Monotyping is a type of printmaking made by drawing or painting on a smooth, non-absorbent surface. The surface, or matrix, was historically a copper etching plate, but in contemporary work it can vary from zinc or glass to acrylic glass. The ...
, a leading supporter of the revival of "old-style" and transitional typefaces, wrote in 1937 of the eighteen-fifties being a time of "batteries of bold, bad faces" and said that "the types cut between 1810 and 1850 represent the worst that have ever been."


Display derivatives

Driven by the increasing popularity of advertising, whether printed or custom
lettering Lettering is an umbrella term that covers the art of drawing letters, instead of simply writing them. Lettering is considered an art form, where each letter in a phrase or quote acts as an illustration. Each letter is created with attention to de ...
, the beginning of the nineteenth century saw the development of bold lettering and the arrival of types of letterform that were not simply larger versions of body text faces. These included the
sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called " serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than s ...
,
slab-serif In typography, a slab serif (also called ''mechanistic'', ''square serif'', ''antique'' or ''Egyptian'') typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular ( Rockwell), ...
and new styles of bold blackletter, but also Didone-style letters that emboldened or decorated the
roman type In Latin script typography, roman is one of the three main kinds of historical type, alongside blackletter and italic. Roman type was modelled from a European scribal manuscript style of the 15th century, based on the pairing of inscriptional c ...
form. Known as '
fat face FatFace is a British lifestyle brand, based in Hampshire, which creates product ranges across women's, men's, kids, footwear and accessories. FatFace is a multichannel retailer, with an international digital business as well as over 180 store ...
s', these showed magnified contrast, keeping the thin parts of the letter slender while magnifying the vertical strokes massively. Other "effect" typefaces were sold such as patterned letterforms which added a pattern to the bold parts of the fat face letter, and the pre-existing inline types with a line inside the type.


Displacement

Didone fonts began to decline in popularity for general use, especially in the English-speaking world, around the end of the nineteenth century. The rise of the
slab serif In typography, a slab serif (also called ''mechanistic'', ''square serif'', ''antique'' or ''Egyptian'') typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular ( Rockwell), ...
and
sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called " serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than s ...
genres displaced fat faces from much display use, while the revival of interest in "old-style" designs reduced its use in body text. This trend, influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement and antiquarian-minded printers such as
William Morris William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) was a British textile designer, poet, artist, novelist, architectural conservationist, printer, translator and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts Movement. He w ...
, rejected austere, classical designs of type, ultimately in favour of gentler designs. Some of these were revivals of typefaces from between the Renaissance and the late eighteenth century such as revivals (with varying levels of faithfulness to the originals) of the work of
Nicolas Jenson Nicholas Jenson (c. 1420 – 1480) was a French engraver, pioneer, printer and type designer who carried out most of his work in Venice, Italy. Jenson acted as Master of the French Royal Mint at Tours and is credited with being the creator of on ...
, William Caslon's "
Caslon Caslon is the name given to serif typefaces designed by William Caslon I (c. 1692–1766) in London, or inspired by his work. Caslon worked as an engraver of punches, the masters used to stamp the moulds or matrices used to cast metal ty ...
" typefaces and others such as
Bembo Bembo is a serif typeface created by the British branch of the Monotype Corporation in 1928–1929 and most commonly used for body text. It is a member of the " old-style" of serif fonts, with its regular or roman style based on a design cut ar ...
and
Garamond Garamond is a group of many serif typefaces, named for sixteenth-century Parisian engraver Claude Garamond, generally spelled as Garamont in his lifetime. Garamond-style typefaces are popular and particularly often used for book printing and bo ...
. Others such as "Old Styles" from
Miller and Richard Miller & Richard was a type foundry based in Edinburgh that designed and manufactured metal type. It operated from 1809 to 1952. The foundry was established by William Miller. He had been works manager of the foundry established by Alexander W ...
,
Goudy Old Style Goudy Old Style (also known as just Goudy) is an old-style serif typeface originally created by Frederic W. Goudy for American Type Founders (ATF) in 1915. Suitable for text and display applications, Goudy Old Style matches the historicist tren ...
and
Imprint Imprint or imprinting may refer to: Entertainment * ''Imprint'' (TV series), Canadian television series * "Imprint" (''Masters of Horror''), episode of TV show ''Masters of Horror'' * ''Imprint'' (film), a 2007 independent drama/thriller film ...
were new designs on the same pattern. An early example of the distaste some printers had for the modern type style was French printer Louis Perrin, who would eventually commission some new typeface designs on a traditional model. He wrote in 1855:
You ask me what kind of whim leads me to revive types of the sixteen century today.... I often have to reprint old poetry rom the sixteenth centuryand this task invariably makes me oddly uneasy. I cannot recognise in my proofs the verses … our present day punches, which are so precise, so correct, so regularly aligned, so mathematically symmetrical ... no doubt have their merits, but I should prefer to see them kept for printing reports on the railway.
A revival of interest in the old styles of letter in Britain around 1870 was, however, criticised by master signpainter James Callingham in his contemporary textbook on the art:
It is ... marvellous to think that, after the much desiderated correction o lettershad been applied, an attempt should recently have been made to introduce these old irregular letters again to the public notice, for the vagaries of fashion have of late brought into use in the printing trade several kinds of old-faced types ... and the infection has in some degree been caught by the sign-writer ... we have thus, on the one hand, a hard, an irregular and unfinished letter; and on the other, a graceful, symmetrical and highly finished letter ... there is some indication that this absurdity, like all fashions that have their birth in bad taste, is happily passing away, and the modern letter is again asserting its superiority. It has always been the case in the arts that, after periods of extravaganza and ''bizzarerie'', there has been a recurrence to sound taste. Positive retrogession is against nature and any tendency in this direction will most assuredly correct itself. The adherents of the old irregular alphabets, which were made so because scarcely anyone was capable of making them better, might just as reasonably advocate a return to the rough and unplaned machinery of the first locomotive steam engines, taking as their model the old "Puffing Billy", now so carefully preserved in the Patent Museum at
South Kensington South Kensington, nicknamed Little Paris, is a district just west of Central London in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Historically it settled on part of the scattered Middlesex village of Brompton. Its name was supplanted with ...
.
One influential example in the late nineteenth century was
William Morris William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) was a British textile designer, poet, artist, novelist, architectural conservationist, printer, translator and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts Movement. He w ...
's Kelmscott Press, which commissioned new custom fonts such as his
Golden Type The Golden Type is a serif font designed by artist William Morris for his fine book printing project, the Kelmscott Press, in 1890. It is an "old-style" serif font, based on type designed by engraver and printer Nicolas Jenson in Venice around ...
on medieval and early Renaissance models. Many fine press printers imitated his model, and while some printers such as Stanley Morison in the twentieth century found his work excessive, it was heavily imitated. Talbot Baines Reed in 1890, shortly before his company cast type for Morris, commented on a desire among typefounders to move back to earlier models: "types appeared leaning this way and that, flowery and stringy, skeleton and fat, round and square ... until it became almost a merit that the original shape was barely recognisable. I am not describing a thing of the past. Herod is out-heroded every week in some new fancy which calls itself a letter ... I do not deny that may of our modern fancy letters are graceful ... nor am I bold enough to suggest that at this time of day they can be dispensed with. But I admit to some misgivings at the lengths to which the craze is carrying us, and the almost total abandonment of traditional models which it involves." Frederic Goudy, an Arts and Crafts movement-inspired printer turned type designer, had similar reservations about the lettering style. While he mentioned Bodoni in his book ''Elements of Lettering'', he wrote that it was a style "for which the writer cannot develop any enthusiasm", adding: "his pages adthe brilliance of a fine engraving. The writer dislikes Bodoni's types, because none of them seem free from a feeling of artificiality" As an experiment in this period, Goudy attempted to 'redeem' Didone capitals for titling purposes by leaving a white line in the centre of the thick strokes. He hoped this design, Goudy Open, would leave a lighter
colour Color (American English) or colour (British English) is the visual perceptual property deriving from the spectrum of light interacting with the photoreceptor cells of the eyes. Color categories and physical specifications of color are associ ...
(density of ink) on the paper. Nonetheless, Didone designs have remained in use, and the genre is recognised on the
VOX-ATypI classification In typography, the Vox-ATypI classification makes it possible to classify typefaces into general classes. Devised by Maximilien Vox in 1954, it was adopted in 1962 by the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) and in 1967 as a British S ...
system of typefaces and by the
Association Typographique Internationale The ATypI () or Association Typographique Internationale (the International Typography Association) is an international non-profit organisation dedicated to typography and type design. The primary activity of the association is an annual fall confe ...
(AtypI).Campbell 2000, p. 173 The genre remains particularly popular for general-purpose use in the printing of Greek (the Didot family were among the first to set up a printing press in the newly independent country). It also is often seen in mathematics, as the open-source standard mathematical typesetting programmes TeX and
LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...
use the Computer Modern family as default. The system's creator,
Donald Knuth Donald Ervin Knuth ( ; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer sc ...
, deliberately created the system with the intention of producing an effect inspired by the "classic style" of nineteenth-century scientific printing with a family based on an American Monotype Company Modern face. Many newspapers were founded in the nineteenth century, and many newspaper typefaces have remained rooted in nineteenth-century models of type. Linotype's popular Legibility Group of the 1930s, for many years the model for most newspaper printing worldwide, remained based on this model but toughened-up to increase clarity.
American Type Founders American Type Founders (ATF) Co. was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85% of all type manufactured in the United States. De Vinne, Theodore Low, ''The Practice of Typography,'' Century Com ...
' Bodoni typeface, introduced around 1907-1911, became hugely popular for news headlines. Writing in 2017, digital font designer
Tobias Frere-Jones Tobias Frere-Jones (born Tobias Edgar Mallory Jones; August 28, 1970) is an American type designer who works in New York City. He operates the company Frere-Jones Type and teaches typeface design at the Yale School of Art MFA program. Among his ...
wrote that he had kept his font design for ''
The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
'' based on the nineteenth-century model because it "had to feel like the news." Among popular faces in modern use, the typeface family
Century A century is a period of 100 years. Centuries are numbered ordinally in English and many other languages. The word ''century'' comes from the Latin ''centum'', meaning ''one hundred''. ''Century'' is sometimes abbreviated as c. A centennial or ...
is inspired by later American Didone designs, although compared to many in the Didone genre it has quite a low level of stroke contrast, suitably for its purpose of high legibility in body text. Typefaces of the period have often been revived since for
cold type Phototypesetting is a method of setting type. It uses photography to make columns of type on a scroll of photographic paper. It has been made obsolete by the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publishing (digital typesetting). ...
and digital composition, while modern typefaces along the same lines include Filosofia and the open-source Computer Modern. Some later Didone families have focused on subgenres of the period, such as
Surveyor Surveying or land surveying is the technique, profession, art, and science of determining the terrestrial two-dimensional or three-dimensional positions of points and the distances and angles between them. A land surveying professional is ...
, inspired by labels on maps. Fat face typefaces remained popular for display use in the mid-twentieth century with new designs such as Monotype's Falstaff and
Morris Fuller Benton Morris Fuller Benton (November 30, 1872 – June 30, 1948) was an American typeface designer who headed the design department of the American Type Founders (ATF), for which he was the chief type designer from 1900 to 1937. Many of Benton's ...
's Ultra Bodoni; Matthew Carter's
Elephant Elephants are the largest existing land animals. Three living species are currently recognised: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant. They are the only surviving members of the family Elephantida ...
is a more recent version.


Usage

In print, Didone fonts are often used on high-gloss magazine paper for magazines such as ''
Harper's Bazaar ''Harper's Bazaar'' is an American monthly women's fashion magazine. It was first published in New York City on November 2, 1867, as the weekly ''Harper's Bazar''. ''Harper's Bazaar'' is published by Hearst and considers itself to be the ...
'', on which the paper retains the detail of their high contrast well, and for whose
image An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensio ...
a crisp, 'European' design of type may be considered appropriate. They are used more often for general-purpose body text, such as book printing, in Europe. The effective use of digital Didone typefaces poses unique challenges. While they can look very elegant due to their regular, rational design and fine strokes, a known effect on readers is 'dazzle', where the thick verticals draw the reader's attention and cause them to struggle to concentrate on the other, much thinner strokes that define which letter is which. For this reason, using the right optical size of digital font has been described as particularly essential with Didone designs. Fonts to be used at text sizes will be sturdier designs with thicker 'thin' strokes and serifs (less stroke contrast) and more space between letters than on display designs, to increase legibility. Optical sizes were a natural requirement of printing technology at the time of Didone typefaces' first creation in metal type, since each size of metal type would be custom-cut, but declined as the
pantograph A pantograph (, from their original use for copying writing) is a mechanical linkage connected in a manner based on parallelograms so that the movement of one pen, in tracing an image, produces identical movements in a second pen. If a line dr ...
, phototypesetting and digital fonts made printing the same font at any size simpler; a revival has taken place in recent years. French designer Loïc Sander has suggested that the dazzle effect may be particularly common in designs produced in countries where designers are unfamiliar with how to use them effectively and may choose Didone fonts designed for headings. Many modern Didone digital revivals intended for professional printing, such as Parmagiano, ITC Bodoni and
Hoefler & Frere-Jones Hoefler&Co. (H&Co) is a digital type foundry (font design studio) in Woburn, Massachusetts (formerly New York City), founded by type designer Jonathan Hoefler. H&Co designs typefaces for clients and for retail on its website. The company was fo ...
' Didot and Surveyor, have a range of optical sizes, but this is less common on default computer fonts. Among default Didone fonts on computer systems, Century Schoolbook on Windows is oriented towards body text use, while the Didot revival on
OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...
was specifically intended for display use and not for body text.


Derivatives

The shape of nineteenth-century Didone designs, with their narrow apertures, has been suggested as a major influence on many early sans-serif fonts such as
Akzidenz-Grotesk Akzidenz-Grotesk is a sans-serif typeface family originally released by the Berthold Type Foundry of Berlin. ''german: label=none, italic=no, "Akzidenz"'' indicates its intended use as a typeface for commercial print runs such as publicity, t ...
and its derivatives such as
Helvetica Helvetica (originally Neue Haas Grotesk) is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann. Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the famous 19th century (1890s) ...
, developed in Europe some years after their introduction. An example of this influence is the narrow apertures of these designs, in which strokes on letters such as ''a'' and ''c'' fold up to become vertical, similar to what is seen on Didone serif fonts. Matthew Carter's
Scotch Roman Scotch Roman is a class of typefaces popular in the early nineteenth century, particularly in the United States and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom. These typefaces were modeled on a design known as Pica No. 2 from the Edinburgh foundry of ...
-inspired computer font
Georgia Georgia most commonly refers to: * Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia * Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States Georgia may also refer to: Places Historical states and entities * Related to the ...
is notable as an extremely distant descendant of Didone typefaces. In Georgia, the stroke contrast is greatly reduced and the bold made much bolder than normal in order for the design to render well on a low-resolution computer monitor, but the general letter shape and ball terminals of
Scotch Roman Scotch Roman is a class of typefaces popular in the early nineteenth century, particularly in the United States and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom. These typefaces were modeled on a design known as Pica No. 2 from the Edinburgh foundry of ...
designs are preserved. He also developed the Scotch Roman revival
Miller A miller is a person who operates a mill, a machine to grind a grain (for example corn or wheat) to make flour. Milling is among the oldest of human occupations. "Miller", "Milne" and other variants are common surnames, as are their equivalent ...
for print use. Given these unusual design decisions, Matthew Butterick, an expert on document design, recommended that organizations using Georgia for onscreen display license Miller to achieve a complementary, more balanced reading experience on paper.


Reverse-contrast styles

An eccentric method of reworking and parodying Didone typefaces has long been to invert the contrast, making the thin strokes thick and the thick strokes thin. First seen around 1821 in Britain and occasionally revived since, these are often called ''reverse-contrast'' fonts. They effectively become
slab serif In typography, a slab serif (also called ''mechanistic'', ''square serif'', ''antique'' or ''Egyptian'') typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular ( Rockwell), ...
designs because of the serifs becoming thick. In the 19th century, these designs were called ''Italian'' because of their exotic appearance, but this name is problematic since the designs have no clear connection with Italy; they do slightly resemble '' capitalis rustica'' Roman writing, although this may be a coincidence. They were also called ''Egyptian'', an equally inauthentic term applied to slab serifs of the period. Intended as attention-grabbing novelty display designs more than as serious choices for body text, within four years of their introduction the printer
Thomas Curson Hansard Thomas Curson Hansard (6 November 17765 May 1833) was an English pressman, son of the printer Luke Hansard. Life In 1803, he established a press of his own in Paternoster Row. In the same year, William Cobbett, a newspaperman, began to print t ...
had described them as 'typographic monstrosities'. Nonetheless, somewhat toned-down derivatives of this style persisted in popular use throughout the nineteenth century, and are commonly associated with 'wild west' printing on posters. They ultimately became part of the Clarendon genre of slab-serif typefaces, and these later designs are often called ''
French Clarendon Clarendon is the name of a slab-serif typeface that was released in 1845 by Thorowgood and Co. (or Thorowgood and Besley) of London, a letter foundry often known as the Fann Street Foundry. The original Clarendon design is credited to Robert Be ...
'' designs.


Notes


References


Further reading

* Valerie Lester, ''Giambattista Bodoni: His Life and His World'' (2015) *Sébastien Morlighem, ''The 'modern face' in France and Great Britain, 1781-1825: typography as an ideal of progress'' (thesis, University of Reading, 2014)
download link
* T. M. Cleland, (1916)


External links




Libre Bodoni release
Period specimen books:

of Bodoni's types (1818, published posthumously by his wife), at Rare Book Room
Specimen of Printing Types by Vincent Figgins, Letter Founder
- the specimen book of London typefounder Vincent Figgins, 1834 {{Typography terms Typography Modern serif typefaces