Scope

—Disclaimer. The history of type is literally the history of the world! THP knows “as little as possible” about the mechanical, logistic and technological aspects of printing in general, presses, paper, ink and type-founding metallurgy that limited or liberated type design from century to century and from day to day.

Instead, THP focuses as exclusively as possible on designs of western-European and North American metal and wood display type—Latin-alphabet faces used for letterpress printing during the 19th and early-20th centuries. For educational purposes, pre-digital “nostalgia” faces may be juxtaposed occasionally.

The Industrial Revolution created commercial competition and a need for advertising with large, distinctive letters. THP is concerned primarily with this display type (originally called “job fonts” for projects of one or a few pages) rather than with text type (book fonts):

  • Ideal text type, intended for prolonged silent reading (textbooks, literature, web pages, etc.) is “invisible.” Display type jolts the attention, communicates subliminal messages and/or evokes an intended emotional response.
  • Text type features complete character sets (dual-case alphabets, numerals, punctuation, diacritics, etc.). Pre-digital display type often lacked lower case, “figures” and “points.”
  • Since the 1890s, text type has been teamed with bold and italic variations. Display type rarely offers such companion faces. 19th-Century italics were a minor independent class akin to calligraphy usually reserved for legal and business documents as if handwritten by scribes.
  • Text type was always metal and usually sold by weight; display type (especially wood type and initials) was often sold as single characters.
  • Text type, not meant to be “novel,” was rarely patented (nor patentable). In 1842–1915, more than 1,000 display faces were patented in the US by citizens and non-citizens.
  • Since Gutenberg, the market for text type remains the publishing industry; for display type, the commercial art field (advertising, packaging, signage, social stationery, etc.).

By the 1830s, industry specialization between book and job fonts was becoming clearly defined. While some long-established European founders offered only conservative ornamented Moderns (Didot and Bodoni letterforms) and scripts for title pages of academic and literary books, many new producers emerged and prospered as they fanned and fueled an ever-escalating worldwide demand for eye-catching display faces.