the types were considered neither quaint nor old-fashioned: they looked like the ordinary text and display types of the day. When Caslon’s typefaces were revived in the middle of the 19th century, after the onslaught of the “modern” Didots and Bodonis, they were used at first for “old-fashioned” books and books that might or might not be read straight through. But by the turn of the century, Caslon Old Face (as it came to be known) had become re-established as a standard typeface; in the early 20th century, thanks to numerous revivals manufactured both for hand-setting and for the various hot-metal typesetting machines on the market, Caslon had earned its place in a rule of thumb for printers: “When in doubt, use Caslon.”
In the proliferation of type styles throughout this century, any number of faces that William Caslon would never have recognized have been issued under the name “Caslon.” And in the past four decades, in the process of being adapted first to phototypesetting and then to digital, most of the versions of Caslon either lost their character or ended up too spindly and anemic to be used effectively in text. A few exceptions have appeared in recent years.
Carol Twombly’s Adobe Caslon made Caslon usable again as a text face, although in doing so she regularized it a bit and smoothed out a few of its peculiarities. She also expanded it into a type family of several weights, in accordance with Adobe’s philosophy of what’s needed for today’s typesetting. (Despite the range of weights, Twombly has been quite explicit that her Caslon is only a text face and should not be used larger than 18-point.) At the other end of the size spectrum, Matthew Carter’s Big Caslon takes some of the eccentric features of Caslon’s largest sizes and sharpens them into a very lively, high-contrast display face (in one weight of roman only) that should probably only be used at 36-point or larger. A few other potentially useful Caslons exist in digital form, but there remained a big gap: an accurate revival of William Caslon’s original types, in all their variations from size to size.
That’s the gap that ITC Founder’s Caslon sets out to fill. Justin Howes, using the extensive resources of the St. Bride Printing Library in London, thoroughly researched William Caslon and his types and took on the task of digitizing every size of type that Caslon cast. In the 18th century, each size of a typeface had to be cut separately, by hand, so the design might vary subtly from size to size; the punchcutter would compensate for the changes in scale and make each individual font appropriate to its size. (Since these were pieces of metal, not electronic representations, and photography hadn’t been invented yet, there was no possibility of printing a type at any size other than the size for which it was originally cut.) Caslon’s types varied pretty obviously from size to size; anyone adapting the face to modern typesetting methods has generally had to choose one size to work from, or amalgamate “typical” features from various sizes into a single homogenized “Caslon.” What Justin Howes did was take each size on its own merits, and digitize it separately, keeping its peculiarities and reproducing it the way it actually appeared on the printed page. Out of Caslon’s welter of sizes and designs, ITC has chosen to issue four in its Founder’s Caslon series.
The ITC Founder’s Caslon family comprises a text size (Founder’s Caslon Twelve, based on the Pica or 12-point size) and three display sizes (Founder’s Caslon Thirty and Forty-Two, based respectively on the Two-line English or 30-point and on the Two-line Double Pica or 42-point size, and Founder’s Caslon Poster, which is based on contemporary proofs of the only authentic wood-letter version of Caslon Old Face, produced in the 1890s by the HW Caslon firm in a range of sizes). The text size, the 30-point, and the 42-point have italics and small caps, and the 42-point also has alternate italics. The “poster” size exists solely as a roman face. In keeping with the original Caslon types, none of the sizes have bold weights, and the numerals in all the fonts are old-style (lowercase) figures. The character sets include a full set of ligatures, including “quaint” forms such as “c-t,” plus the 18th-century long-s and its own ligatures (see image at right).
There’s a scale of smoothness as well as size. Founder’s Caslon Twelve, which is taken from printed text type, has noticeably uneven edges, and more irregularities of form than the larger sizes. At the original 12-point size, this roughness translates simply as natural printing, and it actually enhances the pleasure and ease of reading text. If you use Founder’s Caslon Twelve at, say, 36-point, the rough edges will look exaggerated. The edges are progressively smoother in Thirty, Forty-Two, and Poster, as befits the size of use for which they were intended.
There’s also a special font of Founder’s Caslon Ornaments, which provides 18th-century type ornaments taken from William Caslon’s specimen sheets.
William Caslon I was the preeminent punch-cutter and type supplier of 18th-century England, and his types crossed the Atlantic to become the standard medium for the printed word in the American colonies as well. (The founding document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, was set in Caslon types when it was first printed and distributed throughout the insurgent colonies.) He started out as a gunsmith’s apprentice, and when he went into business for himself, he branched out into engraving the tools and stamps used by bookbinders. His lettering skills caught the eyes of a consortium of Englishmen who wanted to break the dependence of the London printing trade on types imported from Holland, and several of his friends financed his start in type founding. English printing and type founding had been stunted throughout much of the 16th and 17th centuries by overzealous government censorship and control, but by 1720, when Caslon went into business, the restrictions had eased, and the country was alive with printing and publishing. Caslon’s first typefaces were an Arabic font and a pica roman and italic.
By the 1730s, Caslon was dominating his competitors and had issued his first type-specimen sheet, showing not only a wide range of roman and italic text and display sizes but also fonts of Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, Syriac, Gothic, Coptic, Saxon, Samaritan, and Arabic. His business continued to expand, his types followed the British shipping lanes, and William Caslon ended up a rich and respected member of the establishment. In 1750, he was made a justice of the peace (a peculiarly English sort of accolade). As a promoter of music as well as printing, he hosted monthly concerts in his large home; these were held on the first Thursday after the full moon, which led his guests (among whom may well have been the composer Handel) to call themselves the “Lunaticks.”
Caslon also founded a dynasty: when he died in 1766, he left the business to his son, William Caslon II, and the foundry continued through his descendents and later under independent owners, until 1936; thereafter, its more popular types were acquired by the Stephenson Blake foundry, which continued to sell them until it closed its doors only a few years ago. Although even the Caslon foundry’s own specimens, in the early 19th century, showed only the newfangled “modern” styles of type, the original Caslon types were always available if they were needed.
Although they never completely disappeared, the credit for reviving Caslon’s types usually goes to Charles Whittingham and his Chiswick Press. In several books in the 1840s, Whittingham flew in the face of fashion and used the Caslon types on title pages, and in 1844 he published the first new book set entirely in Caslon, The Diary of Lady Willoughby. (Ironically, that book was a period piece of an even earlier period: its subtitle is As relates to her Domestic History in the Reign of Charles I, nearly a century before William Caslon cut his first punch.) The typography was deliberately antique, but the typefaces began to seep into the public consciousness nonetheless.
George Bernard Shaw famously insisted that all his books must be set in Caslon — hand-set, until an enterprising printer insisted on a blind test of the same page in hand-set and machine-set Caslon; after long and diligent examination, Shaw picked the “real” page, which turned out to be machine-set. (In the 18th century, Caslon had been the subject of another famous test of type identification. When Benjamin Franklin was championing the types of John Baskerville and another disgruntled customer was complaining that the new types were painful to the eye, Franklin presented a type specimen to the critic and told him it was set in Baskerville; predictably, Baskerville’s detractor proceeded to elaborate upon the defects of the printed page in front of him. But in fact the unknowing critic had been set up: Franklin had given him a specimen of the same old Caslon types that the gentleman was used to. Franklin had simply torn off the top line with the founder’s name. Perhaps that’s a feature of Caslon and a source of its popularity, that we can see in it whatever we want to see.)
As Colin Banks said of the type, at the launch party for ITC Founder’s Caslon at the St. Bride Printing Library in London in October, “It does have a sort of enduring English charm, and we think of it here as our very own.” By dint of hard study and careful digital work, Justin Howes has delved into the English past and brought that charm back, transparently, ready to be deployed in the service of every modern goal.