Successor

The Industrial Revolution that began in the late eighteenth century ushered in vast economic, societal, and conceptual changes that also led to unprecedented developments in type. First, the widespread introduction of advertising and cheaply printed ephemera sparked a rivalry among printers for the most eye-catching layouts and novel typeface designs. Second, the notion that tasks could be subjected to mechanized processes engendered a new conceptual attitude toward craft. This marked the birth of the idea in type design, and it led to an explosion in new type styles. If one compares the progression of the English Modern to the fat face and then on to the Egyptian, one can see an emerging concept of boldness. The fat face increased the weight of the Modern horizontally; once this was done, it became evident that this step could be repeated vertically to achieve maximum density on the same skeleton. 

The characteristic features of the Egyptian follow from this operation. The thinner strokes are optically as heavy as the thicker ones, and the serifs become boxy slabs, which are usually unbracketed.2 To accommodate additional weight in the lowercase, the x-height is fairly large. Descender length is moderate, and the ascenders typically align to cap height. The thickness of horizontal strokes creates the impression of heavy “rails” along the extrema of the line of type. To prevent the counters from closing up, strokes in the middle of letters (the bars on the A, E, a, and e, for instance) are often much lighter than at the top and bottom, as are branching joins on letters like G, h, m, n, r, u, b, d, p, q, a, and g.

As with many other type styles, the first appearance of the slab serif letterform cannot be conclusively dated. Slab serifs had been printed from wood blocks by 1810,3 and almost certainly were used before that in architectural inscriptions, shop signs, and so forth, although these can be much harder to place historically. Alan Bartram shows Egyptian lettering gracing a 1754 building in Berwick-upon-Tweed.4 The inscription was clearly added later; the question is, of course, by how much. Nicolete Gray offers an example of slab serif lettering on a tombstone as early as 1727, although the delicacy of the forms bears little in common with the solid Egyptian style of the early 1800s.5 Nonetheless, it’s clear that the robust forms would have lent themselves well to stone or wood carving, and also would have looked even more striking to contemporary eyes than they do today. It was only logical for typefounders to capitalize on this bold new trend.

The first known slab serifs cast in metal type appear in Vincent Figgins’s specimen of 1817, where they were called “Antiques”. As was typical of contemporary display faces, they were uppercase only. Around the same time, Robert Thorne was also evidently working on a set of Egyptians. However, these did not appear in print until after his death, when they were acquired by William Thorowgood and shown in his specimen of 1821. (This specimen, incidentally, was the first to call the style “Egyptian.”) Either way, the style was neither Figgins’s creation nor Thorne’s—nor a new invention at all, at that point.

This is not to say that the Egyptian style was fully resolved by the time it appeared in type. A number of early attempts show the false starts and dead ends that resulted as punchcutters experimented with different approaches. Edmund Fry & Son’s Six-Line (72 point) Antique shows what happens when little effort is made toward consistency. It almost appears as though each letter was drawn separately by a different person, and their juxtaposition is chaotic.

The Frys were not alone in struggling with the new genre. The geometric, uncontrasted O in their example was also employed by Caslon and Figgins, and appears as well in the earliest sans serifs, which emerged around the same time and whose development parallels that of the slab. It illustrates the balance punchcutters were trying to strike between aesthetics (which favors a contrasted form) and concept (which favors evenness of stroke).

The novel style was not without controversy, perhaps exacerbated by the sort of missteps evident in the Fry specimen. T. C. Hansard’s Typographia describes Egyptians as “typographical monstrosities.”6 Daniel Berkeley Updike cites a contemporary joke book lampooning popular bafflement at letters in which “the thin strokes were exactly the same size as the thick ones.”7 By the mid-1820s, however, its popularity had reached critical mass. Nearly all the English foundries were offering Antiques in multiple sizes and styles by this point. And as ephemera from the era attest, printers eagerly adopted these new types, which offered an unprecedented degree of boldness.

The Figgins, Caslon, and Thorowgood specimens from 1821 all include italics in capitals only. In 1825, Caslon introduced an italic lowercase. This followed convention in preserving the cursive tails and the ball terminals of the Modern and fat face italic. The tails improve the spacing of lighter-weight faces, but prevent a heavy italic Egyptian from matching the density of its related upright. Several typefounders (such as Thorowgood) addressed this problem by rounding the tails, or, in the innovative approach of Hugh Hughes, by truncating the ends. However, it seems that no one was prepared to do away with these strokes entirely.

From their earliest appearance, Egyptians were cut at small sizes. Figgins’s 1817 specimen contains a Two-Line Nonpareil (12 point) Antique, and by 1821 he offered sizes all the way down to Diamond (4 ½ point). These were in capitals only, but by the mid-1820s his and other foundries were offering upper- and lowercase Egyptian fonts at text sizes. The fact that even these small sizes were still quite bold suggests that they were not being used for extended text typesetting, but rather for specialist tasks like small print on handbills and book title pages.

Once printers realized that the sturdiness of Egyptian forms held up as well or better than Moderns at small sizes on low-quality ink and paper, lighter weights suitable for extended text were developed. At that point, bolder Egyptians of matching size were then employed for emphasis within text.

The Figgins foundry was also the scene of much innovation in the Egyptian’s weight range. In the 1830s, several foundries began to offer Egyptians of the same size in different cuts, named simply Numbers 1, 2, 3, and so forth. Often this referred to stylistic variants such as different lowercase terminals. However, Figgins also showed different degrees of boldness. This was explored in earnest more toward the middle of the century with the Two-Line Double Pica (48 point) Antique of 1847, which Nicolete Gray considers the first light Egyptian.8 This date places it in context with the arrival of light sans serifs, and suggests a parallel development with lighter Egyptians for text. Figgins also pioneered the ultra-thin “Skeleton” Antique, in which the letter was truly reduced to a monoline. 

Narrow Antiques began to appear in the 1830s, more or less simultaneously with condensed fat faces and sans serifs. Thorowgood’s specimen of 1832 contained the first example of a narrow Egyptian we know of in type.9 Later in the decade, foundries had begun to offer them in a wide range of sizes from 12 points to the colossal 360 points. These narrower letters can be divided into two styles: the compact (or elongated/compressed), where the O and other round letters are oval on the outside with a flat counter; and the condensed, where the round letters take on almost totally flat sides inside and out.

Although the condensed Egyptian was quickly adopted by printers for fitting more words into a line, wide styles came only later, and judging from print records, they found comparatively little use. Nicolete Gray claims the expanded Egyptian first appears in Figgins’s 1847 specimen;10 by the 1850s, Figgins was showing expanded Antiques in an entire range of weights, some with lowercase as well as capitals. Robert Besley of the Fann Street Foundry released an expanded Antique, in capitals and figures only, in a wide range of sizes in the 1850s. By the 1870s, Miller & Richard had cut several expanded slab serifs in both upper- and lowercase, and also added a thinner weight. As with the condensed widths, there seem to be no surviving italics for extended Egyptians during this time period—perhaps it was simply not worth the trouble for faces that were so rarely used.

Like its forerunners, Successor was designed beginning from the heaviest weights in the normal width at display sizes. The primary models here were Figgins’s largest sizes. In these Egyptians, there is an overall authority, refinement, evenness of tone, and crispness that set a high-water mark for the style. Figgins’s lowercase is also particularly successful in its choice of flat terminals, which reduce visual noise and help harmonize with the uppercase.

While Caslon’s Romans vary in quality, the foundry’s italics (particularly the 2-line English Antique Italic of 1825 shown above) provided the primary model for Successor’s. In contrast to the rounded model of Thorowgood, the sharpness of Caslon’s italics fit well with the Successor romans.   

The Egyptian, like the fat face, is not only a genre; it’s also an idea about transforming the weight on the skeleton of a letter. Nicolete Gray considered this powerful idea “the most brilliant typographical invention of the [nineteenth] century, and perhaps the most complete and concise expression of the dominant culture of its brief period.”11 Not unlike our own time, this was a period of sweeping change, formidable in its challenges but thrilling in its possibilities. New styles like the Egyptian initially posed obstacles to typefounders, but quickly sparked exuberant innovation that continued unabated for decades. The gusto with which typefounders invented new variations on the Egyptian is manifest in the vitality and appealing imperfections of their letterforms. Successor applies a modern structure to these sources with a resolve not to erase this personality and humanity. It captures the compelling type forms that were the direct product of an unfolding new worldview, ones that are as relevant to designers today as they were two centuries ago.