The first sanserif type

This is a sample of a printing type of which the first known appearance is a setting of a few words under the heading ‘Two Lines English Egyptian’¹ in a specimen of the London typefounder William Caslon IV (1781–1869)² issued in about 1816. It is a monoline letter, that is one with strokes of even thickness, and its round letters are based on perfect circles. It is the first sanserif type,³ the earliest known example of a style that would become one of the most widely used typefaces of the twentieth century. At the same time, it has faint echoes of the incised characters of Periclean Athens, one of the most purely geometrical versions of the letters from which our present capitals are descended.

Historians of printing types have seen the two ‘linear’ printing types which appeared in England in the second decade of the nineteenth century as an expression of the spirit of the industrial revolution. The even strokes of the sanserif and slab-serif – since both forms have sometimes been called ‘Egyptian’⁴ an unambiguous nomenclature is necessary – make a striking contrast with the hugely differentiated thick and thin strokes of the contemporary ‘fat face’ roman type. It is true that the unprecedented size and weight of the new types of this decade were made possible by technical advances in typecasting and the construction of presses, and it is likely that their existence is due to the requirements of the entrepreneurs of the world’s most industrialized economy.⁵ But the question of the origin of these letterforms, and their relationship with each other, is not so simply resolved. To see them, as some have done, as merely the crude, naif creation of ill-educated artisans, a kind of ‘engineer’s letter’, is demonstrably wrong.

The first slab-serif type appears under the heading ‘Antique’ in specimens of types cast by Vincent Figgins⁶ which have the date ‘1815’ on their title page.⁷ It is a geometrical, monoline letter with square, unbracketed serifs that match the weight of the other strokes. A F Johnson commented in his Type Designs (1934) that the sanserif, which apparently appeared in the following year, was the slab-serif ‘with the serifs knocked off’.⁸ Some support was lent to this idea by the indisputable fact that the slab-serif was immediately adopted by typefounders and printers. Every British typefounder produced the design in a wide range of sizes, and the slab-serif was eventually accepted, not without reluctance,⁹ by the printers of continental Europe. The sanserif type on the other hand, this truncated variant of the slab-serif, had no apparent commercial success. No contemporary use of the Caslon ‘Egyptian’ type is known,¹⁰ and it was not until the eighteen-thirties that the ‘Sans-serif’ of Figgins, and the ‘Grotesque’ of Thorowgood,¹¹ very different types indeed, made the design acceptable to the printing trade.

There is some truth in this, but not much. The sanserif type may well have appeared before the slab-serif, since only two of the known copies of the Figgins type specimen of ‘1815’ include examples of the ‘Antique’ type, and both of these have leaves with the date 1817 in the watermark. Moreover, in 1816 the sanserif letter had already appeared in printed matter for ten years and had been employed in other contexts for more than twenty, whereas practically no true slab-serif – a geometrical monoline letter with unbracketed serifs – is known before its appearance as a printing type. It would seem more likely, therefore, that the slab-serif is the sanserif with serifs added in order to make it acceptable to printers, one of the most conservative of trades. Typographical historians have been equally reluctant, despite the evidence of names like ‘Egyptian’ and ‘Antique’, to accept that the linear types, far from being the naif product of uneducated engineers, might actually have been intended as a reference to the monoline letters of antiquity, but here again the context in which the sanserif was employed suggests that this was almost invariably the case.

Greek inscriptional letters of the fifth century BC are monoline and starkly geometrical. Their purity is slightly diminished early in the following century by the addition of decorative end strokes (serifs). Early Roman letters, derived from Greek models, follow a similar pattern, although the serifs are generally far less obtrusive than they later became in Greece. The inscriptional capitals of the Roman republican period are geometrical in form, often with minimal serifs, or none at all. A dramatic change took place in the age of Augustus, when the adoption of the practice of setting out inscriptions with a broad brush provided the more carefully designed capitals of the imperial period (first to fifth centuries) with their familiar articulation of thick and thin strokes.

When Roman capitals were revived by Italian artists in the fifteenth century, the monoline ‘republican’ model was sometimes followed, as can be seen from the inscriptions of the medals of Pisanello.¹² But the well-cut examples of the ‘imperial’ letter, with its thick and thin strokes, proved to be a more attractive model for the antiquarians and artists like Feliciano and Alberti who early in the second half of the century set the pattern for others. The fortuitous harmony of these calligraphic letters with the pen-formed humanistic minuscule script led to the wedding of the two, and to the perpetuation of capitals and lower-case in the ‘antiqua’ or ‘Roman’ printing type. Later developments in calligraphy and type design only accentuated the contrast of thick and thin, a process that had reached an extreme point when the monoline letter attracted the attention of neo-classical artists in the late eighteenth century.

Neo-classical art is at one and the same time a matter of archaeology – the accurate measurement and depiction of the buildings and artefacts of antiquity – and also of morality. ‘For neoclassical artists the imitation of the antique was not an end in itself but a means of creating ideal works of universal and eternal validity.’¹³ David’s painting of The Oath of the Horatii (1784–85), with its powerfully grouped figures and simple tuscan colonnade, has been called ‘the visual expression of moral certainty’.¹⁴ Robert Rosenblum remarks that ‘in the late eighteenth century, classical architecture could often be interpreted as a source of geometrically pure and hence therapeutic forms. Indeed, this attraction to primary, elemental types dominated much of the late eighteenth-century experience of the classical and the proto-classical, an experience that is most conveniently blanketed under the term Primitivism. From the mid-century on, challenging enquirers of Western arts and letters looked back to the origins of the long evolutionary sequence that had led, ultimately, to what was considered the corruption-whether political, moral or aesthetic-of the contemporary world.’ Added to this was ‘the recurrent eighteenth-century image of classical architecture as something fascinating or even terrifying in its rude simplicity’.¹⁵

John Soane (1753–1837), the major English neo-classical architect, is the first and most consistent user of sanserif letters. He may have found a model in the drawings made by his former master George Dance of the inscription of the little Republican Roman Temple of Vesta (or ‘of the Sybil’) at Tivoli, in which an idealized geometrical monoline form is conferred on the much-weathered original. Soane, much influenced by Dance’s ideas, was to build a facsimile of a segment of this temple into the Bank of England: the so-called ‘Tivoli corner’. He had begun to label his drawings with mock ‘inscriptions’, carefully shaded and weathered, soon after his own return from Rome in 1780. From 1784 onwards, these are commonly carefully-drawn monoline sanserifs, the geometrical accuracy being ensured with the aid of compasses. John Flaxman, the most widely known of English neo-classical sculptors, used a sanserif in 1799 and the following years to accompany his concept of Britannia as Pallas Athene. If Soane’s model was to some extent Republican Roman, Flaxman’s was certainly Greek, but it also should be borne in mind that, unusually for his time, he was an enthusiastic collector of Pisanello’s medals.

Examples of sanserif letters in the work of English neo-classical artists could be multiplied.¹⁶ What evidence we have for the date of the entry of this archaic, elemental letter into commercial public use points to the years 1806 or 1807. A ‘joke book’ of 1806 is cited by D B Updike for its comment on ‘fashionable Egyptian sign-boards. An Irishman describing the Egyptian letters which at present deface the Metropolis, declared that the thin strokes were exactly the same as the thick ones!’¹⁷ A similar reaction to the use of novel ‘Egyptian letters’ for the painted fascias of shops was described by Robert Southey in 1807. It is not difficult to guess how the sanserif came to be called ‘Egyptian’. Just as Greek architecture was the origin of Roman, but simpler, purer and more primitive, so in its turn it was supposed to be derived from the Egyptian: all three are variations on the Antique. The sanserifs that appear in books in 1806–7, on plates and engraved title pages,¹⁸ often no longer have quite the pure monoline form of their models. Insidiously, the engravers destroyed the simple geometry by giving the letter a slight variation of thick and thin; one guesses that many signwriters did the same: all their education in the making of letters must have required this alternation of the thickness of strokes.

The same influence was eventually seen in type. The first of the kind that was to be commercially popular, Figgins’s ‘Sans-serif’ of 1830, is a set of well-drawn bold capitals with a slight but distinct thick and thin variation of its strokes. The Thorowgood ‘Grotesque’ of 1832 is more innovative still: it has a lower-case, and it is highly condensed, and thus suited to the packing of information into handbills and posters. These two types are the ancestors of the jobbing types of the later nineteenth century, from which Univers, Helvetica, and some dozens of other types are derived. They have lost most of the archaeological associations that they ever had, and fulfil the idea of the sanserif as a neutral, engineer’s letter which was so attractive to the poet Stefan George and the designer Peter Behrens in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. But it is the purer geometry of the Underground Railway sanserif, drawn at Frank Pick’s request by Edward Johnston, or of Futura and the related German types of the nineteen-twenties that is more widely recognised as a symbol of the modern movement. None of these can have been directly influenced by the type of Caslon IV, though the Underground letter strikingly resembles it in some details. What they have in common is the deliberate rejection of the elaborate inflections that the roman letter has acquired in centuries of development and its replacement with clean, rational lines, stripped of redundant detail. The ‘Egyptian’ type of William Caslon IV is both an explicit reflection of classical antiquity and the first of the ‘universal’ letters of the modern world.

POSTSCRIPT

In 1819 the typefoundry of William Caslon IV was acquired by the newly established Sheffield firm Blake, Garnett & Co. Their type specimen of that year, made up of material printed for the specimens of William Caslon IV, includes the leaf for the ‘Egyptian’ type.¹⁹ The type is not shown in their later specimens, nor in the first specimens of Blake & Stephenson, as the firm became in 1830. It does reappear in 1838,²⁰ however, and is shown in some specimens of Blake and Stephenson and Stephenson, Blake & Co. in the eighteen-forties²¹ before being finally superseded by the new sanserif types of the later nineteenth century. Its presence in several United States type specimens may possibly be explained by the use of electrotyping to copy matrices.²²

The wording of the first specimen of the type, set in one line, reads ‘W CASLON JUNR LETTERFOUNDER’. Several features indicate the experimental nature of this style of letter where a typefounder was concerned.²³ The punchcutting is uncertain and the simple form of the sanserif reveals imperfections more cruelly than a more complex design would have done. A kink in the S suggests that the punch was flawed, perhaps cracked. Some of these flaws can be detected in the later nineteenth-century specimens of the type, and might have been visible in the original specimen, too, if it had not been so heavily inked. Another indication of the tentative nature of the fount is the absence of points after the abbreviations and at the end of the line, where nineteenth-century convention absolutely required them. By the later eighteen-thirties, when the type was revived, square full points had been added, following the style of the points made for slab-serif types.²⁴ By this time, too, at least one letter, the C, had been recut, giving it a clumsy lower part that spoils the symmetry of the original letter.²⁵

The fount was cast for I M Imprimit²⁶ at the type foundry of the University Press, Oxford, by courtesy of the Printer to the University and of Stephenson, Blake & Co., the then owners of the matrices.²⁷ The caster was Mr Don Turner. This called for exceptional skill, since the matrices are clumsily finished and are pitted on the face. The type foundry at the University Press was established in the late seventeenth century and Caslon’s Egyptian was the last fount made there before the foundry was closed in February 1987.²⁸