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This article is about the typeface. For the person, see.
For other uses, see. Caslon Caslon Type Foundry Variations many Shown here Adobe Caslon by Caslon is the name given to designed by (c. 1692–1766) in London, or inspired by his work.
Caslon worked as an of, the masters used to stamp the moulds or used to cast metal type. He worked in the tradition of what is now called serif letter design, that produced letters with a relatively organic structure resembling with a.
Caslon established a tradition of engraving type in London, which previously had not been common, and so he was influenced by the imported typefaces that were popular in England at the time. His typefaces established a strong reputation for their quality and their attractive appearance, suitable for extended passages of text. The letterforms of Caslon's include an 'A' with a concave hollow at top left and a 'G' without a downwards-pointing spur at bottom right. The sides of the 'M' are straight.
The 'W' has three terminals at the top and the 'b' has a small tapered stroke ending at bottom left. And are relatively short and the level of stroke contrast is modest in body text sizes. However, Caslon created subtly different designs of letter at different sizes, with increasing levels of fine detail and sharp contrast in stroke weight at larger sizes. Caslon's larger-size roman fonts have two serifs on the 'C', while his smaller-size versions have one half-arrow serif only at top right. In, Caslon's h folds inwards and the A is sharply slanted.
The Q, T v, w, and z all have in the original design, something not all revivals follow. The italic 'J' has a crossbar and a rotated casting was used by Caslon in many sizes on his specimens to form the. Caslon's typefaces were popular in his lifetime and beyond, and after a brief period of eclipse in the early nineteenth century returned to popularity, particularly for setting printed body text and books. Many revivals exist, with varying faithfulness to Caslon's original design.
Modern Caslon revivals also often add features such as a matching and 'lining' numbers at the height of capital letters, neither of which were used in Caslon's time. William Berkson, designer of a revival of Caslon, describes Caslon in body text as 'comfortable and inviting'. William Caslon's 1734 Specimen sheet. Some of the types shown were not cut by Caslon, most notably the French Canon roman (probably cut by ). Caslon began his career in London as an apprentice engraver of ornamental designs on firearms and other metalwork. According to printer and historian, the main source on Caslon's life, the accuracy of his work came to the attention of prominent London printers, who advanced him money to carve for printing, first for exotic languages and then as his reputation developed for the Latin alphabet. Punchcutting was a difficult technique and many of the techniques used were kept secret by punchcutters or passed on from father to son.
Caslon would later follow this practice himself, according to Nichols teaching his son his methods privately while locked in a room where nobody could watch them. As British printers had little success or experience of making their own types, they were forced to use equipment bought from the Netherlands, or France, and Caslon's types are therefore clearly influenced by the popular Dutch typefaces of his period. Summarises his early work: 'Caslon's pica.was based very closely indeed on a pica roman and italic that appears on the specimen sheet of the widow of the Amsterdam printer Dirck Voskens, c.1695, and which Bowyer had used for some years. Caslon's pica replaces it in his printing from 1725Caslon's Great Primer roman, first used in 1728, a type that was much admired in the twentieth century, is clearly related to the Text Romeyn of Voskens, a type of the early seventeenth century used by several London printers and now attributed to the punch-cutter Nicolas Briot of Gouda.' Mosley also describes several other Caslon faces as 'intelligent adaptations' of the Voskens Pica.
Caslon's type rapidly built up a reputation for workmanship, being described by Henry Newman in 1733 as 'the work of that Artist who seems to aspire to outvying all the Workmen in his way in Europe, so that our Printers send no more to Holland for the Elzevir and other Letters which they formerly valued themselves much.' Mosley describes Caslon's Long Primer No. 1 type as 'type with generous proportions and it was normally cast with letter-spacing that was not too tight, characteristics that are needed in types on a small body. And yet it is so soundly made that words that are set in it keep their shape and are comfortably readable.It is a type that works best in the narrow measure of a two-column page or in quite modest octavos.' Caslon sold a French Canon face he did not engrave that may to have been the work of with some modifications, and his larger-size faces follow this high-contrast model. Compared to the more delicate, stylised and experimental designs that developed in Europe during Caslon's life, notably the type and the work of in Amsterdam, and the of in Birmingham that appeared towards the end of Caslon's career, Caslon's type was quite conservative. Johnson notes that his 1764 specimen 'might have been produced a hundred years earlier'.
Described Caslon's type as 'a happy archaicism'. While not used extensively in Europe, Caslon types were distributed throughout the British Empire, including British North America, where they were used on the printing the. After William Caslon I’s death, the use of his types diminished, but had a revival between 1840–80 as a part of the British.
Besides regular text fonts, Caslon cut or 'Gothic' types (and sold some earlier ones from older foundries), which were also printed on his specimen. These could be used for purposes such as title pages, emphasis and. Bold type did not exist in Caslon's time, although some of his larger-size fonts are quite bold. One criticism of some Caslon-style typefaces has been a concern that the capitals are too thick in design and stand out too much, making for an uneven colour on the page.
Printer and typeface designer was a critic: 'the strong contrast between the over-black stems of the capitals and the light weight stems in the lower-case.makes a 'spotty' page'. He cited dissatisfaction with the style as an incentive for becoming more involved in type design around 1911, when he created as an alternative.
Eclipse Caslon's types fell out of interest in the late eighteenth century, due to the arrival of typefaces like and then designs. His remained in business at Chiswell Street, London, but began to sell alternative and additional designs, some cut by his son William Caslon II. His grandson, William Caslon III, broke away from the family to establish a competitor foundry at Salisbury Square, by buying up the company of the late Joseph Jackson.
Justin Howes suggests that there may have been some attempt to update some of Caslon's types towards the newer style starting before 1816, noting that Caslon type cast by the 1840s included 'a handful of sorts, Q, an open-form italic h, ſh, Q, T and Y, which would have been unfamiliar to Caslon, and which may have been cut at the end of the eighteenth century in a modest attempt to bring Old Face up to date. The h, ſh and T are to be seen in a book from 1816, large parts of which appear to have been printed from well-worn standing type.'
Even as Caslon's type itself largely fell out of use, his reputation remained strong within the printing community. The printer and social reformer wrote in 1825: At the commencement of the 18th century the native talent of the was so little prized by the printers of the metropolis, that they were in the habit of importing founts from Holland.and the printers of the present day might still have been driven to the inconvenience of importation had not a genius, in the person of William Caslon, arisen to rescue his country from the disgrace of typographical inferiority. Similarly, Edward Bull in 1842 called Caslon 'the great chief and father of English type.' Return to popularity.
Caslon was often used for in the nineteenth century in the United Kingdom, for example the famous edition of, published by in 1847 and printed by the. Fine printing presses, notably the, bought original Caslon type from the Caslon foundry; copies of these matrices were also made. From the 1860s new types began to appear in a style similar to Caslon's, starting from 's of c. The Caslon foundry itself covertly cut new swash capitals and replaced some sizes with new, cleaner versions. In the United States, Caslons became almost a genre, modified expanded with new styles such as bold, condensed, inline or with modifications such as shortened descenders to fit American common line, or lining figures.
Declaration Of Independence Font Ttf
Many foundries cut (or, in many cases, pirated) their own versions. By the 1920s, offered a large range of styles, some numbered rather than named. ( is a descendant of one of these American Caslon revivals.
A series of modifications has given most modern Bookman digitisations a somewhat exaggerated appearance with extremely high very unlike the original Caslon.) The companies Linotype, Monotype, Intertype and Ludlow, which sold machines that cast type under the control of a keyboard, brought out their own Caslon releases. Swash capitals for Caslon 540. Note the difficulty of designing a swash 'I' that does not resemble a 'J'. Caslon 540 was a second American Type Founders version with shortened to allow tighter linespacing.
The italic was distributed by with a matching set of swashes. As a result, this often became sold or used without the regular or roman style of this revival. Caslon 3 A slighter bolder version of Caslon 540, released by American Type Founders in 1905.
BitStream sells Caslon 3 under the name of Caslon Bold with its Caslon 540 release. Russian studio ParaType have released both with Cyrillic glyphs. Caslon Openface A decorative openface serif typeface with very high ascenders, popular in the United States. Despite the name, it has no connection to Caslon: it was an import of the French typeface 'Le Moreau-le-Jeune', created by Fonderie Peignot in Paris, by ATF branch Barnhart Brothers & Spindlers. The Monotype Corporation (UK) The produced three Caslon revivals. 1903, Series 20, Old Face Special 1906, Series 45, Old Face Standard 1915, Series 128 & 209, Caslon & Caslon Titling. Main article: A more regular adaptation of Caslon by the British branch of Monotype was commissioned by the London publishers of, a short-lived printing trade periodical that published during 1913.
It had a higher x-height and was intended to offer an italic more complementary to the roman. It has remained popular since and has been digitised by Monotype. Ludlow Typograph Company, Chicago, Illinois, USA Ludlow had a wide variety of Caslon-types.
Caslon 641 A heavy version of Caslon 540, released by American Type Founders in 1966. Caslon 223 and 224 Caslon 223 and 224 were families designed by of Lubalin, Smith, Carnase and then. Like many ITC families, they have an aggressive, advertising-oriented bold structure, not closely related to Caslon's original work. 223 was the first version (named for LSC's street number), a companion version with more body text-oriented proportions followed sequentially numbered 224. Digital-only releases.
Media related to at Wikimedia Commons Adobe Caslon is a very popular revival designed. It is based on Caslon's own specimen pages printed between 1734 and 1770 and is a member of the programme. It added many features now standard in high-quality digital fonts, such as small caps, old style figures, swash letters, ligatures, alternate letters, fractions, subscripts and superscripts, and matching ornaments. Adobe Caslon is used for body text in and is one of the two official typefaces of the.
A modification is used on U. It is also available with Adobe's programme, in some weights for free. Big Caslon (1994). Two alternative revivals of Caslon, designed for large and small text sizes. Big Caslon by is inspired by the 'funkiness' of the three largest sizes of type from the Caslon foundry. These have a unique design with dramatic stroke contrast, complementary but very different to Caslon's text faces; one was apparently originally created by rather than Caslon.
The typeface is intended for use at 18pt and above. The standard weight is bundled with Apple's operating system in a release including and alternates such as the. Initially published by his company Carter & Cone, in 2014 Carter revisited the design adding bold and black designs with matching italics, and republished it through. It is used by magazine and the. LTC Caslon (2005) LTC Caslon is a digitisation of the Lanston Type Company's 14 point size Caslon 337 of 1915 (itself a revival of the original Caslon types). This family include fonts in regular and bold weights, with fractions, ligatures, small caps (regular and regular italic only), swashes (regular italic weight only), and Central European characters.
An notable feature is that like some hot metal releases of Caslon, two separate options for descenders are provided for all styles: long descenders (creating a more elegant designs) or short (allowing tighter linespacing). To celebrate its release, LTC included in early sales a CD of music by The William Caslon Experience, a downtempo electronic act, along with a limited edition upright italic design, 'LTC Caslon Remix'. Williams Caslon Text (2010) A modern attempt to capture the spirit of Caslon by William Berkson, intended for use in body text. Although not aimed at being fully authentic in every respect, the typeface closely follows Caslon's original specimen sheet in many respects. The weight is heavier than many earlier revivals, to compensate for changes in printing processes, and the italic is less slanted (with variation in stroke angle) than on many other Caslon releases.
Berkson described his design choices in an extensive article series. Released by, it includes bold and bold italic designs, and a complete feature set across all weights, including bold small caps and swash italic alternates as well as optional shorter descenders and a 'modernist' italic option to turn off swashes on lower-case letters and reduce the slant on the 'A' for a more spare appearance. It is currently used in magazine and.
A notable feature of Caslon's structure is its widely splayed T, which can space awkwardly with an 'h' afterwards. Accordingly, an emerging tradition among digital releases is to offer a 'Th' ligature, inspired by a tradition in calligraphy, to achieve tighter letterspacing. Adobe Caslon, LTC Caslon, Williams Caslon and Big Caslon (italics only, in the Font Bureau release) all offer a 'Th' ligature as default or as an alternate.
Distressed revivals. Caslon Old Face marketed in a 1915 specimen brochure with mock-18th century title page A number of Caslon revivals are 'distressed' in style, adding intentional irregularities to capture the worn, jagged feel of metal type. ITC Founder's Caslon (1998) ITC Founder's Caslon was digitized. He used the resources of the in London to thoroughly research William Caslon and his types. Unlike previous digital revivals, this family closely follows the tradition of building separate typefaces intended for different sizes. Distressing varies by style, matching the effect of metal type, with large optical sizes offering the cleanest appearance.
This family was released by ITC in December 1998. Following the original Caslon types, it does not include bold typefaces, but uses old style figures for all numbers. Caslon version Following the release of ITC Founder's Caslon, Justin Howes revived the H.W. Caslon & Company name, and released an expanded version of the ITC typefaces under the Founders Caslon name. Caslon Old Face is a typeface with multiple optical sizes, including 8, 10, 12, 14, 18, 22, 24, 30, 36, 42, 48, 60, 72, 96 points. Each font has small capitals, long esses and swash characters.
The 96 point font came in roman only and without small capitals. Caslon Old Face was released in July 2001. Caslon Ornaments is a typeface containing ornament glyphs. These typefaces are packaged in the following formats:. Founders Caslon Text: Caslon Old Face (8, 10, 12, 14, 18), Caslon Ornaments.
Founders Caslon Display: Caslon Old Face (22, 24, 30, 36, 42, 48, 60, 72), Caslon Ornaments. Founders Caslon 1776: Caslon Old Face (14), Caslon Ornaments.
A selection of the types used on the United States Declaration of Independence. However, following the death of Justin Howes, the revived H.W. Caslon & Company went out of business. NotCaslon (1995) An exuberant parody of Caslon italics created by Mark Andresen, this 1995 font was created by blending together samples of Caslon from 'bits and pieces of dry transfer lettering: flakes, nicks, and all'.
Franklin Caslon (2006). Arabic numerals in Caslon's time were written as what are now called, styled with variable height like lower-case letters. Mosley identifies other non-Caslon types as the Samaritan and Syriac, and 'it is difficult to believe that the lower case of the Small Pica no. 1.can be Caslon's work unless it is an early attempt.
It was replaced in 1742, the only one of the roman types to be abandoned in this way.' . 'Elzevir' is a somewhat meaningless term meaning small types used by the family of printers. Mosley concludes that in practice the term meant more 'crisp, competent presswork' than the work of any specific engraver, since the Elseviers often used types cut centuries before in Paris. Note, however, some replacement sorts, including a -style Q and open italic 'h', both in the style of the late eighteenth century. Suggests that these were attempts to modernise Caslon's type towards newer styles. The modern family Quarto by is a well-received revival of the Dutch display types that inspired Caslon’s larger sizes, and is therefore quite similar.
It is not to be confused with a totally different 'Caslon FB' by Jill Pichotta, inspired by bold condensed Caslon-inspired typefaces used in American newspaper headlines. Early sources. Rowe More, Dissertation 1778. John Nicols, Biographical and Literary Anecdotes of William Bowyer 1782.
John Nicols, Literary Anecdotes, 1812–1815 The following two authors based their writings entirely on these three publications. Talbot Baines Reed, A History of Old English Letter Foundries, 1897. Daniel Berkeley Updike, Printing types, their History, forms and use, 1937 Further reading. Conseguera, David, Classic Typefaces: American Type and Type Designers, Skyhorse: 2011. Lawson, Alexander S.,.
Godine: 1990. Meggs, Phillip B, McKelvey, Roy. Revival of the Fittest: Digital Versions of Classic Typefaces. RC Publications, Inc.2000.
Updike, Daniel Berkeley. Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use. Dover Publications, Inc.: 1980. External links Wikimedia Commons has media related to. (see sub-pages for use of specific versions) Specimen books available online.
By the original Caslon Company, run by William Caslon II:. By a breakaway company run by William Caslon III: (completely different typeface designs, in the transitional and modern style). The 20th century Caslon company at its height, including many sample settings. Late specimen sheet of the Caslon foundry from 1924:,.
Included with Commercial Art magazine. Caslon specimen of 1924 is similar. American Type Founders,.
Includes Caslon samples on pages 116-123 & 314-353. American Type Founders, 1923 Specimen Book:,. Includes many examples of American releases of Caslon and sample settings in full-colour printing.
by Eugene Pattenburg in on the popularity of Caslon in contemporary advertising. Many sample showings.
Dearest Member or Visitor of the little Fountain Pen Nut house on the digital prairie, We have noticed that you are using advert blocking software, such as Ad Block Plus. FPN, which is an entirely volunteer run site, relies on advertising for funding of out-of-pocket and running costs like hosting. Please be so kind to add fountainpennetwork.com to your ad blocking whitelist or disable ad blocking when you visit FPN.
If you prefer not to see any adverts, support FPN by donating towards an Ads Free view, either by,. Thank you very much in advance! Warm regards, the FPN Admin Team. Actually, the Declaration of Independence was written by an ordinary person, not a professional engrosser. What the Continental Congress was proposing was treason, and it were better to keep their identities under wraps until after the deed was done and made public - an engrosser could have earned a tidy bounty by turning them in before the document was signed.
Benjamin Franklin summarized the situation when he said, just before signing the paper, 'We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.' Here are two fragments. The first shows the original document.
The second is a facsimile that I've created using a font called American Scribe. (I kept the initial word in my sample because I don't have a font for it.) As you can see, this is not calligraphy. It is merely the hand of an educated gentleman of the 1770s.
The American Scribe font, by the way, was designed from the Declaration of Independence, so you can see why it's so similar. Edited by Richard, 19 April 2008 - 02:52.