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Bulmer is the name given to a
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 a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...
originally designed by punchcutter William Martin around 1790 for the Shakespeare Press, run by William Bulmer (1757–1830). The types were used for printing the Boydell
Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's natio ...
folio edition.


Design and history

Bulmer is considered to be a late "transitional" face. Faces in this style, which became most common in the mid to late eighteenth century, were more crisply engraved than earlier faces. William Martin's typefaces show strong influence of the Baskerville typeface of John Baskerville which popularised this style in England, but with more contrast, bolder, narrower and with sharper serifs. His brother Robert Martin had worked as Baskerville's foreman and William Martin probably worked for him too. They also show influence of the crisp new "modern" faces, now called Didones, increasingly popular on the continent. The typeface used "modern" figures, a recent innovation, at nearly capital-height. Although Bulmer wrote in his preface to his edition of ''Poems by Goldsmith and Parnell'' that Martin would in future be able to offer a specimen of his typefaces, he is not known to have ever issued one. However, they were also used by the
Liverpool Liverpool is a port City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. It is situated on the eastern side of the River Mersey, Mersey Estuary, near the Irish Sea, north-west of London. With a population ...
printer John McCreery and his successor G.F. Harris, who did issue a specimen book in 1807. The Bulmer typeface fell out of interest due to changing tastes in the early nineteenth century following the death of William Martin in 1815, but returned to interest in the twentieth century, when several revival versions were released. In this period, D. B. Updike described Martin's types as "delicate and spirited" and Stanley Morison described it as "a variation on the Baskerville theme". Bulmer's distinguishing characters are an uppercase R with a curved tail. Lowercase g has a small bowl and a curved ear; a heavier stroke weight on the lower right side of the bowl contributes to a sense of that character leaning backwards. Lowercase b's lower left corner is essentially symmetric to d. Uppercase italic characters J, K, N, T and Y have flourishes reminiscent of Baskerville's. The resulting face could show off the high quality of printing technology of the time:
James Mosley James Mosley (born 1935) is a retired librarian and historian whose work has specialised in the history of printing and letter design. The main part of Mosley's career has been 42 years as Librarian of the St Bride Printing Library in London, whe ...
has described Bulmer's editions: "The type was, however, only one ingredient in the ensemble which Bulmer managed to striking success...the good ink, the consistently good presswork and the superb Whatman paper are combined in one of the few really successful English attempts at printing in the grand manner."


Versions


Metal type

Foundry type versions of Bulmer were made by the following manufacturers:Jaspert, W. Pincus, W. Turner Berry and A.F. Johnson. ''The Encyclopedia of Type Faces.'' Blandford Press Lts.: 1953, 1983, , p. 32 *
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 percent of all type manufactured in the United States at the time. De Vinne, Theodore Low, ''The Practice of Typogr ...
(1923-8, Morris Fuller Benton) * Intertype * Lanston Monotype * British Monotype (1937, for an edition of Dickens for the Nonesuch Press printed by R. and R. Clark).


Digital versions

A contemporary digital revival (shown above right), supervised by Robin Nicholas at
Monotype Imaging Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc., founded as Lanston Monotype Machine Company in 1887 in Philadelphia by Tolbert Lanston, is an American (historically Anglo-American) company that specializes in digital typesetting and typeface design for use wit ...
, is based on the 1928 revival by Morris Fuller Benton. It features text and display optical sizes and oldstyle and lining figures.


References

*Fiedl, Frederich, Nicholas Ott and Bernard Stein. ''Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Through History.'' Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. . *Jaspert, W. Pincus, W. Turner Berry and A.F. Johnson. ''The Encyclopædia of Type Faces.'' Blandford Press Lts.: 1953, 1983. . *Lawson, Alexander S., '' Anatomy of a Typeface''. Godine: 1990. . *Macmillan, Neil. ''An A–Z of Type Designers.'' Yale University Press: 2006. . *Updike, Daniel Berkley. ''Printing Types Their History, Forms and Use, Vol. II.'' Dover Publications, Inc.: 1937, 1980.


External links


Bulmer page on Monotype Imaging's website
{{Monotype typefaces Transitional serif typefaces American Type Founders typefaces Monotype typefaces Letterpress typefaces Typefaces with optical sizes Photocomposition typefaces Digital typefaces Typefaces designed by Morris Fuller Benton