![]() Caslon–in versions by just about every foundry making type–was a staple type right through the 19th century and into the 20th.įigure 3. By 1910, the Cheltenham family was already burgeoning in weights and widths. In an ad from a 1918 copy of Harper’s Magazine, a Monotype Caslon Bold title is wed with a Cheltenham Bold Condensed address line (Figure 3). The Chalmers Motor Company is long gone, but Cheltenham, used here for the display type, motors on into the 21st century. ![]() It’s the headline face for the New York Times, for example.įigure 2. Cheltenham, at work in Figure 2 below, was designed a little over a decade earlier by Bertram Goodhue and by 1910 was ubiquitous. Like so many trendy types, Bullfinch Oldstyle speaks to a certain epoch to the exclusion of all others.īut a handful of the book’s recommended faces are still around and have become classics (or like Caslon, already were). Likewise, Arlington’s quirky letterforms didn’t stand the test of time. If Roycroft was supposed to look old-fashioned in 1909, it looks really outdated today. Many intentionally invoked an “old-fashioned” look even then, complete with rough, eroded-looking edges, and yet others used extreme features (not unlike today) such as exaggerated serifs and exotic character shapes to attract attention (Figure 1).įigure 1. Some are hangovers from the heyday of the “fat faces” commonly seen on circus posters and the like. Most of the 30-odd types in the ICS book deserve the obscurity they now enjoy, as they look decidedly out of date. But the idea of typeface families was new, and the idea of routinely creating bold and italic complements to roman faces was just beginning to take hold. The turn of the 20th century was the beginning of a golden age for advertising types, and the demand for novel and distinctive faces was just as strong as it is today. ![]() But now I’m reaching a bit farther back–a century back, in fact, to 1909–to see what Section 6, Part 2, of my revered Volume 204 of the International Correspondence School Reference Library calls “the best advertising, catalog, booklet, and folder types.” Even if I had revivals in mind, I’d be out of luck most of these faces never made the transition from metal to digital. A few months back, I took a stroll down memory lane to revisit some popular faces from the 1980s that have been neglected recently and deserve a better fate.
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