Chiswick: A vernacular letter

The Chiswick collection derives not from a single model or design, but rather from a genre and an idea. Its three families – Chiswick, Chiswick Sans, and Chiswick Grotesque – celebrate the lettering that emerged in the British Isles in the eighteenth century and remained in common use into the twentieth. The collection imagines this form not only as how it might be, but also as what it could be. Its shapes have been fixed into a typeface, though not a typeface that was typical of the time.

Chiswick exists as a counterpoint to Brunel, a modern face which matches the pervading typographic style of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Its nod to the vernacular of the time acts as a foil to Brunel’s gesture towards the era’s formal typefounding; Chiswick’s pastoral disposition offsets Brunel’s more metropolitan style. One is defined by the metal body; the other enjoys the freedom of the bodiless handmade letter.

The writing manual The Universal Penman (1733–1741), engraved by George Bickham, was a compendium of the work of twenty-five writing masters. Famed for its examples of the roundhand script, it also documents more formal styles of lettering, which often have the qualities of type without being restricted by type’s physical confines. This style of letter shares many qualities with Caslon’s work, but the angle of the italic form is steeper.

Chiswick could be described as a British vernacular that evolved in the semi-isolation of an island, though parallels exist in letters found outside its shores. The family draws influence from a wide range of sources: letters found on gravestones and in writing manuals, engraved letters, drawn letters, carved letters, letters on buildings, and letters cast in metal. Before letters were created by mechanised processes, these ubiquitous forms were made by highly skilled workers. Created with love and artistry, the letters often transcended professional requirements.

But why make a typeface from letters? And why from this period? In 2009 Commercial Type was approached by Wolff Olins to make a typeface for the National Trust (or, to give its full title, the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty), a heritage organisation that covers England, Wales, and Northern Ireland (Scotland is covered by a separate organisation). Its huge portfolio of land and range of more than 350 properties spans from the Bronze Age chalk white horses through the twentieth century and the childhood homes of Lennon and McCartney. 

We mooted lots of ideas, both historical and modern, as to what a typeface representing the activity of the National Trust should look like. The project allowed for an exploration of what might constitute a ‘British’ letterform.

At this stage, an existing typeface was considered too literal an interpretation. The typefaces of Baskerville and Caslon (despite the latter’s clear Dutch roots), a modern like Brunel, and more recently Gill could all be considered British, but we rejected them for various reasons.

We began an exploration of the sans form, greatly influenced by James Mosley’s pioneering essay ‘The Nymph and the Grot’ (originally published in Typographica, New Series 12, December 1965) and the (re) birth of the style in the eighteenth century. Mosley’s essay gets its title from the inscription in a grotto at Stourhead, a National Trust property. Early experiments with a literal interpretation proved unsuccessful, so we turned our attention to other examples in Mosley’s essay for inspiration, such as William Caslon IV’s first sans typeface. Ultimately these experiments were also rejected; for one thing, we felt that stylistically they were perhaps too utilitarian and not elegant enough.

This led to an examination of the vernacular style of lettering common to the period of many of the Trust’s properties from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a style strongly associated with the institution of the country house and corresponding perceptions of style and elegance.

The country house occupies an important place in the British psyche; it represents the rural idyll, the pastoral arcadia. We sought a form that would fit not only with the architecture of the classical revival of William Kent or the garden design of Capability Brown, but also with the agricultural paintings of, say, George Stubbs or the world of John Constable. Or with the portraiture of a Gainsborough or a Reynolds. That such art often distorts reality is part of the illusion (and part of our ambit). It pushed us to move further afield from too-literal interpretations and into atmospheres – like the novels of Jane Austen and the social world of Bath. But despite the seductive qualities of a serif face that had ideas of beauty at its core, it quickly became obvious to us that the form fell short of the “universal” image the organisation wanted to project.

We finally settled on a contrasted sans serif for the National Trust – a twenty-first-century design that touches upon different traditions. While National Trust Sans is a letterform of its time, its skeletal structure (except for its vertical proportions) is that of the transitionals of Baskerville, Moore, and Wilson. Its relatively high contrast recalls the elegance of a serif letter, but also the contrasted sans found in lettering and later in typefaces of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In Chiswick, the handmade letter cross-pollinates with type. Taking the vernacular seriffed letter of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and making it into type follows a path forged by John Baskerville. Baskerville’s life – his journey from writing master to industrialist to printer and typefounder – has been well chronicled. The sole extant example of his letter-cutting which is signed (it is believed to have been cut around 1730) is one of the key objects in the history of the letter in Britain of its time. It shows where Baskerville came from (the ‘Writing Master’ moniker places him firmly within the realm of the world of Bickham’s The Universal Penman) and where he was going with his (ad)venture into printing.

But we mustn’t consider this example unusual in itself; by this point, lettering had reached a high level in much of Britain. What was unusual was when lettering made its way into the closed world of printed types at a time when Caslon’s types were dominant. In his preface to the 1758 edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Baskerville wrote: “I formed to my self Ideas of greater accuracy than had yet appeared, and have endeavoured to produce a Sett of Types according to what I conceived to be their true proportion.” 

Baskerville was simultaneously an outsider (provincial and not of the trade of printing and typefounding) and an insider (a master of letters). The lines ‘Cut in any of the Hands’ and ‘WRITING MASTER’ would to many observers simply be copies of his type style. In Commercial Type’s London studio, we have replicas made in 1980 from the original in the Library of Birmingham.

But such close imitation was never the aim of Chiswick. Rather, the goal was to capture the spirit of the vernacular and to serve as a counterpoint to Brunel, which comes from the world of the book, of the broadside, of the fixed-letter image of printing. Brunel is specific to a period of less than thirty years at the end of the eighteenth century and the dawn of the nineteenth. Chiswick, by contrast, embodies the written letter, the drawn letter, the carved letter – the world outside of printing. It spans much of the eighteenth century, nineteenth century, and beyond, extending almost up to our own era. It touches on the imagination and spirit of a time. Brunel is smooth and aims for perfection; Chiswick revels in inconsistencies, eccentricity, and eclecticism. Brunel descends from few sources, Chiswick from many.

In 1963, James Mosley published ‘The English Vernacular’ (Motif, 11, 1963–4). The essay appeared when it was still possible to find forms of lettering actively being practised that would not have looked out of place two centuries earlier. One could still touch the past, but it was clear that it was on the verge of dying out. The mechanisation of letterform production, whether via typewriter, mechanically cut gravestone, or prefabricated letters for shopfronts, accelerated the process and removed the need for the hand. 

Where lettering still existed, a second threat had come in the shape of the Trajan model, which had been adopted as a government standard, and had become the accepted form for letter-cutting. As letterpress died out, the old typefaces remained in small numbers (it is hard to imagine the names Baskerville and Caslon disappearing), but the variety dwindled. ‘The English Vernacular’, like Mosley’s later essay ‘The Nymph and the Grot’, shows how widely distributed the official letterform had become. Mosley noted that originally he thought it would take him two months to find examples of the vernacular; in the end it took two years. Later, the designer Alan Bartram published a series of books that chronicled letters where they could be found – on street signs, on architecture, on storefronts, on gravestones – culminating in The English Lettering Tradition (1986), which categorises and illustrates the diversity of form.

Mosley noted that originally he thought it would take him two months to find examples of the vernacular; in the end it took two years. Later, the designer Alan Bartram published a series of books that chronicled letters where they could be found – on street signs, on architecture, on storefronts, on gravestones – culminating in The English Lettering Tradition (1986), which categorises and illustrates the diversity of form.

Use of the word vernacular is telling; the vernacular is literally the form of the people. These letterforms would be practised by the vast majority of the population, and would be readily accepted and appreciated by virtually everyone. Mosley argued that the British (his use of the term English is not untypical; ‘English’ was often shorthand for ‘British’) had developed a letter style that could be consistently used across many forms, whether Egyptian, Sans, Clarendon, or seriffed roman; whether formal or informal. Those who made letters would instinctively understand the skeletal form of the letter, and then imagine it and reimagine it depending on usage.

Mosley’s hope was that his essay could play the role the copybooks of the past had played, and that people who looked at the examples it included would build something new upon these foundations. One such example, from 1775, was Carington Bowles’s Roman and Italic Print Alphabets. Its subtitle is illuminating: ‘Designed chiefly for | The Use of Painters, Engravers, Carvers, Grave-Stone Cutters, Masons, Plumbers, | and other Artificers; | likewise | very useful for Merchants and Tradesmens Clerk’. Such was the breadth of influence and readership in the eighteenth century; in the twentieth, the examples were aimed at the graphic designer, typographer, and printer.

While type designers certainly would have taken notice of Mosley’s essay, to have actually made typefaces from these examples in the sixties would have been an arcane curiosity (and a costly experiment). Against the backdrop of modernism’s dominance, the ideas of the English vernacular would seem parochial. Matthew Carter’s Snell Roundhand from 1966 might be considered an example of the essay’s influence, but, despite the model’s date of 1712, Carter’s chief aim was technical: producing a script typeface that conformed to the constraints of Linofilm, the state-of-the-art typesetting system of its day. More recently, two typefaces – Surveyor by Tobias Frere-Jones (2002) and a revival of Bowles’s letters by John Morgan Studio for Tate Britain (2013–15) – show the influence of Mosley’s essay and the vernacular style.

Gravestones are probably the richest and most common source of lettering from the high point of the vernacular. If cut on a resistant material (slate, for example) and placed away from the ravages of climatic forces, they will survive across the centuries almost perfectly intact. The large diversity in form offers a designer much to ponder; within one small settlement, the same style of letter could have many variations, even when cut by the same individual. But from county to county, the variations can be greater and greater. Bartram noted particularly rich veins of lettering in the East Midlands. Distance from large urban centres slowed the progress of adoption of the letterform. The extremities of Britain, such as the county of Cornwall in the southwest (where slate was common) show that forms survived longer than they would have in London.

But gravestones are only one source for Chiswick; another is photographs of street scenes. Often created to document the landscape, whether urban or rural, such images accidentally record the richness and diversity of letterforms. In the late nineteenth century, Alfred and John Bool and Henry Dixon documented many buildings that were under threat of demolition for the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London.1 Many examples show lettering, confirming how prevalent the vernacular form was. Today we can still find traces of the vernacular, often in the form of ghost signs, that give a hint of what used to be there long after the original businesses have disappeared.

The terminology and categories we traditionally associate with printing type are less useful and applicable in the case of type derived from lettering. While common classification practice associates Baskerville with the transitional form, and the modern as a later form pioneered by Bodoni in Italy and the Didots in France, closer inspection of the Baskerville slate examples suggests that what we might consider the modern form appears earlier in lettering. If we define ‘modern’ as vertical orientation, strong contrast between thick and thin, and unbracketed serifs, then a case can be made that the modern form is what appears in the Baskerville slate, and in countless other examples. What we find in lettering is that the precision we apply to typefaces often fails to deal with the reality in the field. Chiswick is therefore modern in style, following this terminology: vertical stress, high contrast between thick and thin strokes, and serifs that are fairly flat, though gently angled as if cut by a stone cutter. Yet the terminals have a softness and a roundness, without the crisply defined ball we would expect in a modern, and could therefore be described as more transitional in style.

It is in the individual nature of letters that we can discern the hand. Each serif and stroke vary from letter to letter – not enough to disturb the reader and the rhythm of the form, but enough to add a subtle variety.

The inscription at the heart of Mosley’s ‘The Nymph and the Grot’ was cut in 1748 at Stourhead, Wiltshire.3 As a form, it is hard to place and categorise; it is a contrasted sans with the odd remaining serif. Was it a serif letter whose serifs were cut off, or a sans with the odd serif added? This contrasted form of sans serif seems to have enjoyed some popularity: it can be found on inscriptions on buildings, vases, medals, and gravestones – and eventually in a typeface made by Figgins in the 1880s, which we revived as County.

One can still see the form in Cornwall, where it appears to have been fairly prevalent. A particularly striking example shows a beautiful, highly contrasted sans inscribed on a gravestone. Probably cut in 1831, the stone features many styles: blackletter, roman, script, shaded, and a regular sans serif, making a high-contrast sans unexpected. It would be easy to miss if one didn’t look closely. Like the inscription in Stourhead, it begs the question: Is this a serifless serif or a high-contrast sans? And what possessed the letter cutter to make this choice? Did he cut the initial forms with the intention of cutting the serifs at a later date, and then forget? Or did he simply like the results? The width of certain letters like N, Y, and J suggests that he did not intend to add serifs later and that the choice was deliberate. That other examples of this high-contrast sans have not turned up in the area implies that the experiment was not repeated, or at least that other examples are less extreme.

Chiswick Sans follows a similar path. It’s a serif without serifs. The skeletal structure and contrast are the same, but the detailing is different with the serifs removed. Though the form was a rarity during the height of the English vernacular, Chiswick Sans seems perfectly believable. 

High contrast is one reason we consider a serif face like Chiswick elegant, and it imbues Chiswick Sans with a similar elegance. This refinement makes them somewhat delicate, though, and they need a degree of care in use. Chiswick Grotesque takes a different approach. It is the vernacular rendered in the age of the machine; the skeletal structure remains, but this is a hastily created form made with speed, not finesse. These forms also recall how the sans letter had infiltrated the printed world, first with Caslon IV’s archetypical Egyptian of 1816, with its almost geometric forms; and then with Figgins’s sans faces of 1828. The surviving matrices show a perfectly circular O and Q; and despite the heavy weight and the issues of pure geometry, the type shows amazing spirit.

Chiswick Grotesque lives in the space between lettering and type. It borrows from examples like Figgins, but also from the spirit we see in Henry Dixon’s photographs. It’s a basic sans serif form which retains the spirit of lettering and is less considered and refined than the rest of the family. This can be seen in the O form, for example: as it increases in weight, its simple geometry becomes more obvious. It’s not a form that has been overanalysed; it’s a form that is rudimentary, even crude. The structure is the same as Chiswick’s, but the outcome is quite different.