Clarendon Editorial

The Slab-Serif Revival Anatomy of a typeface

By Alexander Lawson

Clare The Fann Street Foundry, in London, is credited with the introduction of the first Clarendon. This type’s initial appearance was as a condensed letter, and unlike the Egyptians it was issued as a text type rather than for display purposes.

“Furthermore, it was designed to accompany a roman type as a related boldface, to provide emphasis where required.�

In order to blend with the roman, the serifs were bracketed and a degree of contrast was applied to the stroke widths.

A message from Robert Besley to other foundries who copied the design of Clarendon showing the original use of Clarendon as a typeface that provides emphasis while being paired with a roman typeface

The Clarendon design is ascribed to Robert Besley, who had joined William Thorowgood at the Fann Street firm in 1838.

It will be remembered that it was a Thorowgood who had helped to popularize the Egyptians. From a surprising beginning as a typefounder in 1820 - a calling for which he had no training - Thorowgood a year later had parlayed a big win in the national lottery to an appointment as Letter-Founder to His Majesty. The foundry rapidly grew to include Greek, Hebrew, Russian, and German types, and in 1828 it absorbed the foundry of Dr. Edmund Fry with its numerous exotic styles. Besley was no doubt assisted in the design of Clarendon by the skilled punchcutter Bejamin Fox. It so happened that in 1845 England’s designs-copyright amendment act came into being, which permitted registering a typographic design for a three-year period.

Original type specimen books of Clarendon from the Fann Street Foundry

The Slab Serif Revival

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Besley was no doubt assisted in the design of Clarendon by the skilled punchcutter Bejamin Fox. It so happened that in 1845 England’s designs-copyright amendment act came into being, which permitted registering a typographic design for a three-year period. But when Clarendon, the first type to be so registered, became an overwhelming success, the protection was soon violated, with competing firms seeking to take advantage of the type’s popularity. Besley was acrimonious in his denuciation of this plaiarism, a problem, as discussed earlier, that afflicts the industry to the present day.

There is little information concerning the origin of the name Clarendon. De Vinnie in Plains Printing Types (1900) notes that the type was first made for the Clarendon Press at Oxford University, ‘to serve as a display letter in a mass of text-type, and for side headings in dictionaries and books of reference.’

English sources do not support this theory of the type’s having been explicitly manufactured for the Clarendon Press, but they do recognize that the name may well refer to that press.

In England Clarendon subsequently became synonymous with boldface as a description of weight, as it is described in the Oxford English Dictionary.

This Wanted poster demonstrates Clarendon being used as a display type and for side headings

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“Clarendon was made to serve as a display letter in a mass of text-type, and for side headings in dictionaries and books of reference.”

Whatever the derivation of the name, the Clarendon design was a huge commercial success. By 1850 Besley was advertising the virtues of the font as follow:

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“The most useful Founts that a printer can have in his Office are Clarendons: they make a striking word or line either in a hand bill or a title page, and do not overwhelm the other lines: they have been made with great care, so that while they are distinct and striking they possess a graceful outline, avoiding on the one hand, the clumsy inelegance of the antique or egyption character, and on the other, the apperance of an ordinary Roman Letter thickened by long use.”

The idea of using a boldface character for emphasis rather than an italic became well established with Clarendon, a practice that remains common in commercial printing, principally newspapers. When the duplexedm or two-letter, matrix was develoed for the Linotype machine, about 1900, the second letter was invariably an ‘antique’ (Clarendonstyle), when not an italic. Later on, of course, the composing-machine manufacturers develiped complementary bold variants for many of their popular roman styles and so were not dependent on a standardized boldface.

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Clarendon thus began as a bold condensed type, but it was soon appearing in an expanded version and even as a lightface letter. By the 1850’s it was internationally recognized as a utilitarian addition to the commercial composing room.

Besley’s expanded variant became the model for German cuttings as well as for the Clarendons that appeared int he catalogues of the Bruce Foundry in New York, and the Cincinnati Foundry - the first Americans firms to issue the type.

“The square serifs played a dominant role in everyday typography.”

For the balance o the nineteenth century the Clarendons and the Egyptians, by whatever name they went, continued to thrive and were generally more popular than even the gothics. Although the decorated letter and scripts took up much of the attention of the design departments of the foundries - leaving little time for experimentation in modifying the existing square-serif types - for some fifty years (from about 1820 to 1870) the square serifs played a dominant role in everyday typography. Nicolete Gray, In nineteenth century ornamented types and title pages (1938), wrote that the egyptians as developed by the english punchcutters represent the most brilliant typographic expression of the century. But in his printing types (1922), Daniel Berkeley Updike reduces the achievement to but one reference of less than a sentence: ‘...a kind of swollen type-form in which all the lines of a letter were of nearly equal strength ...’(In a footnote he expressed even greater disdain for the form.)

This project was produced in partial fulfillment of the requirements of GDES 311, Typographic Systems, in the Graphic Design Department at The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA Fall 2011.

Philip Harrison, designer Don Kline, Faculty advisor The main text is set in the typeface, New Baskerville, at 14/18. The layout was created using Adobe InDesign CS5.