nf0184: you all have the feedback sheets okay and i'm going to pass round the 
er attendance sheet if you'll if you'll sign it please today's session is on er 
letter form development and that by which i mean we're going to focus on the er 
display types of the nineteenth century er i have a handout here that has space 
for you to er to sketch some of the typefaces that you we'll be looking at on 
the screen in a little while so i'll pass this around 
sf0185: 
nf0184: and here's the there's the attendance sheet there er so far this term 
we've looked at the socio-economic forces behind a number of the rapid changes 
in the in the nineteenth century we have looked at the development in the 
printing presses and machinery and at what happened in papermaking for the last 
two weeks we've been looking at the new processes of photography and 
lithography as well as the er the the rebirth er of the woodcut er when it came 
back in the course of the nineteenth century as wood engraving next week we're 
going to go on to er 
looking at how the making of type speeded up that's type manufacture and 
composition and both er aspects of type and the use of type were mechanized in 
the course of the nineteenth century first the er manufacture of type and then 
actually composing type so that it could be used for er for printing and we 
will have a a demonstration of the working linotype system that's here in the 
department so this week's er topic is the letter forms that are known as 
display type and these were above all a response to the advertising needs er of 
the century's developing commerce and industry and you remember in our second 
lecture we talked about the developments er for advertising that came out of 
the increased production general er industrial production following the 
industrial revolution so what we're trying to er achieve today er in terms of 
these letter forms is looking at approximately when and why they developed i'll 
talk a little bit about the nature of the evidence 
that we have concerning these er display type letter er type forms er which 
amount to what are known as specimens type specimens er type specimens on the 
board there er that come they're issued by the type founders and then er our 
other principal source of evidence for these display letter forms is the 
examples of the printed artefacts themselves so we're actually looking at the 
letter forms er in use so we're going to er er learn the names of the five er 
basic varieties and you'll if you look at your handout you'll see that the 
names er are listed there and er i'm going to show you in a little bit er the 
and i'll allow you time to sketch the principal characteristics of these five 
basic categories wa-, no-, we'll er discuss a little bit how these display 
types relate to book types and you'll see on the board i've written display 
types versus book types by which i mean there are these are two categories of 
the use of types and they have very strong implications for what those types 
look 
like the ty-, types used for books er have an entirely different characteristic 
character and nature from the types that are used for display purposes er which 
you might in this case equate to advertising er purposes er some of the 
terminology for the discussion of types goes back er to the fifteenth century 
and relates a little bit to what we talked about last term all right now let's 
move to the topic of display types themselves er there were er a great many 
types designed for and used more or less only for books those are what i'm 
calling here book types the others are used for er wider purposes especially 
for things that are meant to be posted up and seen from a distance and these 
are the ones that we refer to a lot on this under this general heading of 
heading called display types now we also have a few display functions within 
books er because we use the same term when we're talking about headings and 
types that are just used for for titles er it's a bit confusing to 
have the same term display for both er in both fields but nevertheless we have 
to live with it yeah there are some two handouts one relates to your essays and 
the other relates to the er to today's work and there's also the er attendance 
sheet please in the nineteenth century er it was the display types er that 
underwent the more interesting developments when we compare these two category 
of the use of that type and it's it's generally understood that book types the 
ones used for books were more or less in the doldrums much less interesting in 
terms of their developments so today we're looking at the the category of of of 
type that had its er an e-, an explosion of sorts in the nineteenth century but 
we need to start as usual a little bit before the nineteenth century er because 
for most of the eighteenth century er there were no special types that were 
designed for display purposes instead what was used were the largest available 
book types and these only got to approximately two 
centimetres in height that's what's referred to er in in type as a two-line 
pica at the in the later eighteenth century though we do have the beginnings of 
special design for disla-, display purposes in the seventeen-sixties the French 
er type founding family known as the Fourniers developed letters that that had 
were floriated and floriated letters er it's put up on the board i by floriated 
i mean that that any decoration took the form of er flowers floral patterns and 
in the seventeen-eighties er at least two English type founders er William 
Caslon and and the er type founder Fry developed simple er open what were known 
as open types or alternatively in-line and i'm going to show you one er i-, on 
a slide just now er they're characteristic of these open or in-line and you'll 
see i've got in-line on the board in quotation marks because that was what they 
called it er was a letter that had a white line engraved down the thick strokes 
now i want to to show you this first er late eighteenth century in-line and i 
have to er turn the projector on clumsy 
and i'm going to have to turn off some of the lights i hope you'll be able to 
er see well enough to sketch just maybe all right these are the letters that 
were referred to as in-line er and the the line they're referring to is the 
white line that runs down the thick er thicker portions of the letters and 
you'll see they came in a variety of sizes there er all the way up to er what 
is listed there as five-line pica which is only er two centimetres high er and 
a variety of English printers began to use these large letters for posters er 
as early as seventeen-sixty-five we have we have Thomas Cottrell using letters 
that are about two inches high and i'm going to show you a a slide of just 
rather large letters by Thomas Cottrell these are are are Thomas Cottrell's er 
and i want you not to be er misled by the slide because that does enlarge it 
greatly this is the actual size and i think even at at the back of the room you 
should be able to read that just but you see 
there's quite a difference er so this is the largest late eighteenth century er 
display face that we're er ha-, know about oh i've got my technology and your 
technology all intertwined here 
om0186: 
nf0184: oh if you 
om0186: right yeah 
nf0184: just yeah okay that's good we were so busy setting up his technology we 
didn't get mine sorted okay aagh now the real change in display faces came in 
the first er two decades of the nineteenth century we already mentioned that 
basically it's the needs of the advertising industry er that that led to this 
development for types that come under the phrase eye-catching now if you read 
Professor Twyman and it is his er his chapter five that covers er display 
lettering he says that they er he finds no s-, satisfactory single explanation 
for why all of a sudden there was this great development in in display types he 
points to as i mentioned briefly the growth of trade and then the need the 
growing need for er competitive advertising he points to the fact that 
certain er new generations of of potential purchasers were becoming at least 
partially literate er and he er talks about a number of technical developments 
some of which we've already discussed this term for instance er the development 
that related to the cost of paper so paper prices were going down er we've 
already we've talked earlier about the beginnings of the use of iron presses 
and the fact that er these could print a larger area of dense black type than 
earlier because these er these new faces didn't needed somewhat more er power 
in the machines likewise the origins of the designs er are not wholly 
understood some of them may have come out of the er profession of sign writing 
er the especially the signs that were made for for shops on a high street and 
it is also possible that the er wood engravers er and the work that they were 
doing as as wood engraved lettering er was part of the inspiration and here i 
show you er a slide of a lottery bill er printed in eighteen-ten er which 
has the upper and lower words er done er by a wood engraver and you can see 
that the letters are placed on on banners or what's known as as as cartouches 
these are the sort of er panel that it's on and er they're v-, they're very 
very broad they have er er a shading that suggests three-dimensionality both er 
u-, upper and lower and these er at er at the bottom er have a Gothic type 
inspiration whereas at a-, at the top er the inspiration is much more er er 
Roman i said i was going to discuss what our sources of evidence are for these 
these types of the nineteenth century we know that certain type founders issued 
specimen sheets that are referred to as type specimens but unfortunately as a 
source of evidence the type specimen er is is difficult to interpret by which i 
mean we don't always have the very earliest ones type specimens are issued by 
the makers of these types in order to sell the types er they were showing off 
essentially their wares and so by nature 
these these type specimens were ephemeral sh-, they intended to have a short 
life their purpose wasn't to d-, document their pur-, purpose was to sell so er 
we can only go by the earliest surviving ones we have er to help us date the 
beginnings of this process and there are very good collections of type 
specimens for instance at er the Saint Bride Printing Library er and 
occasionally body academic bodies like the er Printing Historical Society will 
issue facsimiles and they help in sorting out er which type founders started to 
issue these er and when the the other er main source of evidence is the printed 
objects themselves but again these were often very short-lived printed for er 
purposes er of advertising individual er events or objects very often they're 
not dated and er it's highly possible that in the cases of a large proportion 
of them they've just disappeared altogether so again as far as records go there 
it weren't it's not very complete but er the 
collecting of this sort of short-lived material which is known as ephemera er 
is one of the justifications for our departmental Ephemera Studies Centre here 
that was er founded about five years ago [sniff] all that we know for certain 
is that by about eighteen-ten large display types began to appear in the type 
specimens er that do still exist and the first er good ranges er turn up in a 
type specimen dated eighteen-fifteen and this is the eighteen-fifteen er type 
specimen or er this is part of the type spe-, specimen this is this is not 
actually a type specimen itself because you see i-, it's been used as as 
figures ins-, inside a book but it's from a type spe-, specimen from a founder 
known as Figgins the he's got his put his own name in the second m-, ma-, big 
line down er and he had this er reasonably wide range of different styles er 
which i'll go into in some detail in a minute now i want to move on to the five 
basic categories which are on your handout 
er and these were all developed in the first first half of the nineteenth 
century and we'll start with er fat face because that's the earliest and here 
er is an example of of of a a fat face er display type this one er came again 
from er eighteen-fifteen and you'll notice that it is fairly aptly named in 
that it is an extremely fat face now the fat faces were based on a book type 
known as modern face and i've got modern face on the board over there er in 
quotation marks because modern face is not just a a general term but it's a 
specific term er and it it relates to er various characteristics that i'll 
point out to you now first of all a fat face has a very strong vertical 
contrast in other words er the main lines as as you look at it are are vertical 
as opposed to s-, fi-, earlier faces which had er an oblique er angle of 
emphasis so that if you had any fattening it you would be more inclined to put 
an oblique line through it than a vertical line the second characteristic 
general 
characteristic of modern face is is that you have what's referred to as an 
abrupt transition between the thin points and the thick points goes it's not 
it's not smoothed out it's very abrupt now what happens in the fat face is that 
they just exaggerate they exaggerate the difference between the thins and the 
thicks so so much so that the thicks the get almost as almost as wide as a 
third of the height of the er of the letter and it also er the fat faces retain 
this this verticality in the in the design now and when i talk about modern 
face type i'm referring to the to the book types so there there are book type 
designs underlying these display and i'll now show you another fat face which 
again can see such very strong contrasts between the the thinnest and the 
thickest and this one probably makes er the the overall vertical emphasis er 
even stronger now we think that these may have been originated by a er type 
founder named Robert Thorne but by about 
eighteen-twenty most other type founders er at work were offering er fat faces 
and there are important variations er on fat face for instance there was a 
Gothic fat face based o-, on the types er the black letter types that come er 
down from the fifteenth century and then another variation wa-, on the fat face 
was to add shading so that you have this exaggerated a-, area below and to the 
right to give a a suggestion of three-dimensiali three-dimensionality now i'm 
going to move on to the second major category on your handout and that is the 
one that's called the Egyptian er never mind er that the er the heading here 
refers to it as antique the er type founders of the time had no er reason not 
to give each one of these types their own name er so the er terminology of 
these these different types is er a nightmare er what i'm using is the 
categories that have been set up by Professor Twyman in his chapter and er 
Nicolette Gray in her work on nineteenth century ornamented 
types and title pages so the main characteristic of Egyptian was that all of 
the lines including the serifs ha-, are more or less the same thickness so y-, 
you have the the main stroke and the serifs i mean in this in this one on the 
on the screen at the moment the serifs are a little bit less fat than the i 
mean i've never not measured them but i they are less fat nevertheless you have 
the basic overall effect is that all lines are of equal or nearly equal weight 
er and this one was for fro-, is from Figgins' type specimen of eighteen-
seventeen this was a very successful display face and that's because it 
produced a very dark and dense letter which still remained easy to read at a 
distance when it first appeared in eighteen-seventeen it was only in the 
capitals but er from in by the eighteen-twenties we were already having upper 
case and lower case capitals and small letters and this e-, Egyptian along with 
the fat face these are the two most er popular er display 
types the other three that i'm going to discuss next l-, in in the five basic 
were somewhat less widely used especially before about eighteen-thirty so next 
move on to the third one on your handout which is the sans serif in in this 
particular slide i'm only talking about er the line here which er you'll see is 
very helpfully referred to in this one as Egyptian but we have now come to call 
this one er sans serif now the w-, de-, derivation of the term sans serif er 
simply means without serifs sans means without so the sans serif which er as 
you see here er in this case was er originally called either Egyptian or 
sometimes it's called antique er this became the ancestor er of what was the 
the greatest innovation in type design of the nineteenth century and that is 
the sans serif book type i-, its des-, design was intended to capture the 
spirit of the very earliest Roman letter forms and it was er that's why some of 
the the people who who er issued this as a 
type referred to it as antique because it was meant to be antique in 
inspiration and we another term we use for sans serif is that it's monoline in 
other words all of the line one size line i mean the er Egyptian that i just 
showed you in the previous slide had more or less one side er size line but it 
did have serifs so this one has no er no serifs it first appeared in er an 
eighteen-nineteen type specimen er where it was labelled Egyptian and then it 
disappears and it doesn't reappear until the eighteen-thirties when it was 
renamed by Figgins as sans serif and by yet another type founder er renamed it 
grotesque and it's grotesque not in that it's er full of ornate design because 
in fact it's rather austere but because it was found in in grottoes which had 
early Christian inscriptions that were very simple in grottoes so it got an-, 
another name was grotesque er i i can't even apologize for these difference in 
terminologies we just have to live with the fact 
that every time the type founders came out with what they thought was something 
new they gave it another name and it's just luck i mean they had no 
responsibility to those of us who come along later and look at it and try to 
understand what's going on and categorize them and have to just live with the 
fact that they used the same names er for very different looking letter forms 
i'll now go on to one that that doesn't have very many different names and 
that's the Tuscan it's the fourth one on your list er but it's not the one 
that's on the screen it's on i have to put this on the overhead the Tuscan has 
a different characterisci-, characteristic and that is that when it you come to 
the bottom of of the downstroke the serifs curl you can see how they curl in in 
opposite directions er this one also happens to be shaded and so i'm i'm i'm 
asking you at this point to ignore the shading and just look at the main 
downstroke and you'll see that there is a curl to the 
left a curl to the right and then at the top of the d-, er the downs-, er er 
the stroke is an-, another pair of curls er and that is what characterizes er 
the the Tuscan i'm going to show you another one but i'll have to take the the 
the projector back right the Vincent Figgins second line again is a Tuscan and 
there i'll get although this too has further ornamentation on the surface of 
especially the downstrokes you'll see when the downstroke gets to the line er 
it has curls in ei-, in either direction and we sometimes refer to that as as 
[laugh] bifurcated i know you'll love this one it simply means that they're 
split so you refer to the er decoration as split now you've already seen that 
these Tuscans can go on to be er further decorated and and we'll talk about 
that in a minute but now i wa-, i'm going to move on to the fifth and last of 
these basic categories and for that i have to go forward again and that's the 
one that's called 
Italian right now with the Italian which we think actually originated in France 
so why it's called Italian i don't know again the letter in this case reverses 
er our expectations about which parts of the letter are going to be thick and 
which are going to be thin so that you have these huge serifs and very thin er 
vertical strokes in this case so er a an easy one for you to sketch perhaps is 
the I er and it looks it looks quite bizarre and almost er perverse and this 
first came to England in the specimen of er in a specimen of eighteen-twenty-
one now the growth of all these er was quite fast but they're not used by all 
printers er most traditional printers were unhappy to see these used within 
books they were considered inappropriate for books but they were certainly used 
for posters er and many er would have had their m-, their greatest impact on 
the posters that are printed in the provinces at first er some of the smaller 
sizes of these types were er m-, cast in metal but the 
large ones were often er done in wood and i have three examples of display 
letters of the nineteenth century here from the department has very large 
collections er of display letters that you may have noticed now i'd like you er 
i want to to pass these around for you just to to see they are they are these 
all these three are in made of wood sorry and while that's going around i'll 
show you er one of the provincial posters that would be making use of this kind 
of display letter this one is dated er eighteen-thirty-one and you see at the 
top we have a a fat face er the second line down is is a fat face but italic 
with an in-line in other words that white line that come-, decoration that 
comes down and here we have a fat face that's been shadowed to give it a three-
dimensional look and the surfaces have been er have been decorated so that is a 
typical er n-, nineteenth century poster making use of some of the display 
faces that we've been discussing so far in eighteen-twenty-seven 
there was a a a technical development that led to some new styles er a machine 
known as a as a a routing machine a mechanical routing machine was developed 
invented in America and it facilitated the making of large quantities of these 
letters although in some cases we find that the routing machine itself affected 
the shapes of the letters and er i'll show you one example of this general 
phenomenon where the oops this is a type specimen showing the different sizes 
of a letter where the the cutting implement of the router has this rounded 
shape on its blade and so that in this particular case the shape that naturally 
developed by this new tool has been built into the design of the letter the 
eighteen-thirties and forties saw a great deal more designs some of them were 
three-dimensional some of them were what's known as reversed out that's where 
instead of the normal black letter you got er a black background and the letter 
is reversed out in white er from this black 
background a great deal of ornamentation you've already seen a little bit of it 
er and then the letters started to be either er elongated or perhaps m-, turned 
into rustic letters and here's an example er of a Figgins er type specimen of 
eighteen-fifty so that you see up the top you've got a-, an Egyptian that is 
put at a slant and er given a three-dimensionality you've got er a a fat face 
er Gothic you've got a reversed out er Egyptian another er er oh Egyptian er 
turned on an angle and er with the opposite of the word virtue but made three-
dimensional again er an Egyptian er that er has been reversed out or outlined 
depending on how you how you want to er look at it er then Gothic and down at 
the bottom our our classic Tuscan with ornamentation o-, on the surface and the 
eighteen-forties saw yet er another development which is known a-, a-, as the 
Clarendon oh oh sorry er [throat] i've got this slightly out of order in in 
fact in the this this specimen shows a variety of sizes of sans of sans 
serifs er but the development of the eighteen-forties that i just started to 
say was er s-, th-, the er family known as the Clarendons now this one is not 
on on your sheet er and it's not easy to see the impact that the Clarendons 
would have but they were like like the er very heavy Egyptian only in this case 
is n-, as i say you can't really see it from back there instead of having 
having your serif meet the a vertical at a at at a stiff right angle they added 
what's known as a little bracket you soften it you put a little curve between 
the the vertical and th-, and the serif and so you get a slightly more elegant 
letter that still has the er i-, the a-, ability for the density and impact of 
of the Egyptian now i i said that apart from type specimens the other source of 
information er that we have about these type faces display faces of the 
nineteenth century are the er artefacts that they printed themselves er and er 
in a minute i'm going to show you some of the the l-, very l-, end of the 
nineteenth century's developments 
well first i just mention some of the er influences behind these new letter 
forms er we know that there was er for instance a a g-, a growing interest i-, 
in the Middle Ages in the nineteenth century one of the reasons that they 
picked off the er Gothic or black letter er shapes that had been around since 
the fifteenth century and we will see er when we er in the lecture on on 
coloured printing er how some of the interest in the Middle Ages er er 
manifested itself there were also er a number of excavations go-, that had gone 
on in the in the eighteenth century that led to interests in in Rome er and and 
antiquity there were er excavations in Rome itself and in Herculaneum there was 
er interest in travel and and er arc-, other archaeological er expeditions that 
led us mo-, a greater familiarity with exotic languages for instance the 
Rosetta Stone was d-, er discovered around er s-, in seventeen-ninety-nine so 
er there were general influences from outside that were coming in and 
that er the when they type founders did pick names like Egyptian or antique er 
it suggests that they were responding to some of these er outside influences a 
bit later in the century we find that there m-, may have been influence from 
the er flexibility that the lithographic printers er were developing and that 
the that their ability to er draw anything they liked in terms of shape er on 
to the lithographic stone was beginning to work backwards and have have effects 
on these much more rigid letter forms that are cast in metal or cut in wood er 
and i refer you in this case to some of the discussions in er Professor 
Twyman's book er which is er chapter five now i want just to finish off by 
showing you some of the er exuberant designs of the late nineteenth century and 
their use as posters er could i ask you to turn the projector off please first 
i'll start with some letter forms that were er probably a-, as developed as you 
could get er in terms of the er exploitation of the 
surface of the fat face and these er are very large display letters done by a 
man named Pouché er that's P-O-U-C-H- E-acute er these have fairly recently 
been been published in full because they er original letter forms were 
discovered er and the wood letters were not intended to be printed from 
directly but to cast er be cast as er electrotypes and and printed from the 
electrotypes but you can see er not only do they have er the the sh-, the 
shading which gives them this suggestion of three-dimensionality but the the er 
er floral and fruit patterns are are extremely elaborate that was a-, that is 
about as as beautiful as the letter form gets er i'll just show you two or 
three examples of how they're used er at the top we have a ha-, have a sans 
serif er in the middle Tuscans these are Tuscans just some fat face here more 
Tuscans then er sans serifs that have been shadowed and er the rest is is 
largely in in sans serif [cough] these letter forms er which are done 
in in this case on on c-, in a copper plate engraving you can see well i'm i'm 
not going to stand here and name them all to you but you can see Gothics you 
can see Tuscans you can see sans serifs fat faces really the lot er and and 
this is about er eighteen-seventy this particular image and finally even closer 
to the end of the century i'm sorry this this this new machine doesn't let you 
move it up but here you can see er a very interesting if odd way of of handling 
the letter form so that you're actually supposed to read the shadows that are 
cast by these individual er figures so the so word itself the letters 
themselves come up as as shadows and here er a Tuscan shadowed Tuscan up here 
letter forms that are made er out of er out of little people at the top er a 
reversed out er 
sans serif so by the end of the nineteenth century er the letter forms er were 
completely transformed from er what we had er started with which were merely 
large sizes of of book faces that were er used occasionally for display at the 
beginning er of the nineteenth century now er i would recommend that you follow 
this up by having a good look at er Twyman chapter five and oner er or another 
of the books by Nicolette Gray er next week we have the demonstrations er on 
the monotype machine and we talk about type casting type making and type 
casting and the combination of those two now if any of the rest of you haven't 
signed the register or filled out one of these cover sheets for your essay 
please do that that's it