 What I'm going to talk about today is the story of how the sans-serif evolved into the first true alternative for text typography since the Roman and italic types of the 15th and 16th centuries. It might surprise you, despite Shelley's very generous comments, to know that much of the material I'm going to show you consists of original research done by little old me. Well, this was a bit of a surprise to me too because I'm no historian. I first started studying the history of letter forms while I was doing a master's degree in typeface design at the University of Reading. Toward the middle of the year when our history class got up to the 19th century, I was astonished to discover that the very first sans-serif in type only appeared exactly 200 years ago this year in 1816. 1816. Somehow I'd never really thought about this before. I had just assumed that even though sans-serifs weren't really a big part of Latin typography until the 19th century, surely they must have existed before then. I mean, we certainly think of the sans-serif as a sort of modern type style and we associate the forms of the grotesque in particular with the 19th and 20th centuries, but it never occurred to me that sans-serif types hadn't actually been around in some form for a great deal longer than that, especially given that sans-serif letter forms, not type, but letter forms, have actually been around much longer than serif ones. So this first sans-serif typeface, William Caslon's two-line English Egyptian of 1816, is quite well known. In fact, the 200th anniversary of its appearance this year is even being marked and celebrated in various corners of the type world because that's how we type nerds roll. So we'll look at it in a few minutes, but basically it's a simple bold and sort of clunky but elegant typeface consisting only of uppercase letters and cut only in one size. And although Caslon's Egyptian was indeed the first sans-serif to apparent type, and by a good 15 years at that, it doesn't have a lower case and without that and for several other key reasons we'll talk about later. It can't really be considered the true progenitor of this third text style in addition to the Roman and Italic. So when I started looking into this question, trying to connect the dots, sorry one sec, and figure out how these forms of Caslon's uppercase sans-serif might have evolved into the myriad styles of sans-serif type that dominate the graphic landscape today, in particular Helvetica, which is arguably the world's most ubiquitous Latin typeface, serif or no serif. I was then even more astonished by what I discovered was a near complete lack of scholarship about the early history of the sans-serif in type and especially about its origins as a viable text style and especially in comparison with the volume of words that have been written about the origins and development of its companion styles, the serif, Roman and Italic. What did exist was an extraordinary small book called The Nymph in the Grat by James Mosley, who I was extremely fortunate to have as my history lecture at Reading, which essentially tells the life story of the sans-serif uppercase, but only lettering and only up to the point that this first uppercase sans-serif typeface appears in Caslon's specimen book in 1816. And aside from a few books that focus only on individual parts of the story, a few brief articles and some short chapters in books on broader subjects, the closest thing to a complete study of the early history of sans-serif types is a 1960 article by a woman named Phyllis Handover, I like to call her Phyllis, called Letters Without Serifs, which unfortunately is quite flawed and inaccurate in a variety of ways, which I won't go into here. And that's literally about it. So I started looking into it myself, and that turned into this research project and eventually the dissertation for my master's degree. Who knew you could get a master's degree in sans-serif, right? So after Caslon's Egyptian, most of what was known was that the 19th century produced a morass of anonymous and quotidian jobbing and display faces, out of which ultimately rose several clearly identifiable new sans-serif styles in a relatively short period in the very late 19th and early 20th centuries. There was the grotesque, typified by Venus and Accident's grotesque around that time. Then the American Gothic, which was essentially, to my mind, a genre unto itself, pretty much singlehandedly created by the extraordinary Morse Fuller Benton for ATF. Then there was the humanist sans-serif, which originated in the work of Edward Johnston and Eric Gill. And finally, the geometric sans-serif, early examples of which were Paul Renner's Futura and William Addison-Dwiggins' Metro. But the 80 years of development between Caslon's Egyptian and Accident's grotesque, the typeface that would ultimately be reinterpreted as Helvetica, was basically a black box. Now, in some ways I can see that this relative lack of history is somewhat understandable. The genesis of serif Roman type during the Renaissance essentially defined what the Latin printed word would look like. Pretty much it's a day. It's also a lot easier to study because there were so far fewer typefounders in the 15th and 16th centuries. But this disparity in the literature still stunned me because if the Renaissance era Roman and Italic perhaps crystallized what literary language looks like, the sans-serif is what contemporary language looks like. It's the language of commerce, of design, of the everyday. In fact, even the Notorious Historicist, I can't believe I got that out, Notorious Historicist, Historicist. Why did I put a tongue twister in this? Anyway, even the Notorious Historicist, Stanley Morrison, has stated the 19th century invention of the sans-serif lowercase was quote, the most novel and permanent contribution to letter design that had appeared on the printed page since the Aldi and Italic of 1501. But it would seem that very few scholars have agreed with him. Anyway, despite the lack of academic interest in the subject, we know these didn't spring up from nowhere. So without further ado, let's try to find out what happened inside that black box. So first, a bit of the backstory. Let's look at what we do know. Unserif Latin uppercase letters have actually got a long and familiar history, which has been very well documented. I'll summarize it for you. As I mentioned, the story of their early development in ancient Rome and the process by which they first appeared in type, more than 300 years after the first Roman and Italic types, is beautifully told by the historian James Mosley in his book The Nymph in the Crot. It's a bit of a long story, but it's important, so I'm going to summarize it for you as quickly as I can. So unserifed magiscule letters have actually been around for millennia. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, they've been around longer than serifed ones have. The alphabets from which our Latin alphabet developed, such as Phoenician, Etruscan, and Greek, were essentially monolinear and without serifs. In fact, the very first serifs only began to appear in Greek inscriptions around 334 BC. Pardon me. So what we're looking at here is an example of earlier unserifed Greek lettering from the fifth century BC, which is set in the Stoichodon style, which means that the letters are aligned both vertically and horizontally, forming a kind of grid. I don't think you can read it in both directions, but it looks like you can almost. It's like a Greek crossword. Anyway, as many of you know, the notion of modulated stroke weight or variation from thick to thin within letter forms is said to have arisen in imperial Rome in the first century AD, so about 400 years later than what we were just talking about. The most famous examples of this are the magiscule letters you see here from the column of Trajan, and now of course familiar from movie posters everywhere. However, the earlier Roman letter from the time of the Roman Republic, which is roughly up to the first century BC, so about 200 years before the Trajan column, was more directly derived from the Greek capitals we saw a minute ago. And because it was attempting to imitate Greek visually, it resembles it much more closely. So it's worth mentioning here that ancient Rome was the first of a series of periods of classical revival, which ultimately hearkened back to ancient Greece. Sorry, ancient Greece is a model. Philosophically, politically, and aesthetically, and along with it the unseriffed forms of its letters. This pattern is going to become extremely obvious and important in the next few minutes. So the Republican Roman letter that you see here, and this is an example of unseriffed Roman Republican lettering from the British Museum from about ADBC, this becomes the prototype for a time of later Latin uppercase sans serifs. There were serif Republican letters as well, but their serifs tended to be more like little wedges, much more secondary to the letter shapes than they become in the imperial letter, where there are much more integral part of the whole shape. And of course, it's important to remember that at this point the Latin alphabet consisted only of uppercase letters. The later style of imperial Roman capitals, like the ones we saw on Trajan's column, would only come to be combined with a lowercase, which was based on the 8th century Carolingian minuscule, a millennium and a half later during the Renaissance, which of course also happened to be the next period of classical revival after ancient Rome. Hopefully we can all remember our art history. Kind of comes in handy here. So once the Roman imperial letter took hold, and then as the Middle Ages dawned, the sans serif disappeared from Latin lettering quite thoroughly, until it was rediscovered for a time during the Renaissance, when antiquity again became a touchstone of European culture. It wasn't a major presence during the Renaissance, since the Middle Ages lettering had become completely dominated by broad-edged writing instruments, which don't exactly lend themselves to monolinear letter forms, but it was a quietly persistent one. So this is a fairly typical example of what sans serifs looked like during the Renaissance. You can clearly see a relationship to imperial Roman capitals here, but this quintessential Renaissance form is definitely taking on an identity of its own, tending to be more condensed, more high-waisted, and slightly modulated in stroke weight. In fact, to my eye, looking almost more like it derives from the early Roman rustic hand that you see here than the Roman inscriptional tradition. You do see more clearly Republican-style sans serifs during the Renaissance as well, though, like this one from Potolome on a map from 1477. I think that's a really lovely example, so elegant. So James Mosley's account has the sans serif disappearing pretty much completely after the Renaissance, not to re-emerge until the neoclassical period, beginning in the late 1700s. But there actually do seem to be many examples to be found starting 100 years earlier in the mid-late 1600s. So this might just be a sideshow, and not the main narrative, but it's still part of the story, and I think it's worth looking at a few examples. And it does fit with this main narrative to some extent, as this period coincides with the advent of another moment of classical revival, which is the Enlightenment. Curiously, though, despite the fact that by this point, the Latin alphabet finally does most assuredly have a lower case, all of the sans serif examples of this period still feature an upper case only. And many of them look rather curiously medieval as well, which is odd given the sort of whole repetition of classical forms that we're talking about being the impetus for these being revived. So this one is a gravestone from Gosforth, England in 1628. And I think we could probably all agree that that certainly looks more medieval than classical in character. Ditto this one, a cast metal plate also from England in 1689. Something to point out here is the double curve on the leg of the uppercase R in repaired on the first line and in mayoralty in the center. Can everybody see this okay? Hopefully it's clear. This is something we have not seen in a sans serif R before. They're generally either fully straight, possibly with a slight outstroke like that, or they're curved only at the top, as in the Renaissance version, then coming down in diagonal. So that's something to note because we'll see that again. The cursive form of the Y in mayoralty at the end of mayoralty in the center there is also a bit curious. Not something I've seen before. And here are some more starkly monolinear sans serif letters on this fantastic lintel stone from Wensleydale, England in 1691. This came up on eBay. I would totally buy it. I think it's so pretty. But sans serif letters in this period were not just found in Europe. Matthew Carter very kindly provided me with some examples, which there are apparently many. Of sans serif lettering on New England gravestones, like this one from Massachusetts in 1672. Again, you can note the medieval character of the A and the curved stroke of the Y. But this inscription contains a clear reference to the Roman letter as well, substituting the letter V for you in February on the last line and using interpoints instead of word spaces as the Romans did. And I also just have to point out the awesome, the ligature at the top on the top right. And here's another one also from Massachusetts, but over 50 years later from 1727. Again, with this kooky medieval style A with a bar on top. And I just love all the contractions here. There's definitely nothing expert or fancy about this carving, but I find it thoroughly charming. So this leads us to where James Moseley's account picks up again with the neoclassical period of the 18th century. I just want to make sure I didn't skip anything yet. Okay. I'm just going to indulge in a lozenge. I tend to lose my voice when I do this talk. I don't know why. Hopefully you won't be hearing a lozenge more than my voice. So in very broad strokes, the neoclassical movement began as a reaction against the excesses of the Rococo age, directing cultural values back toward the perceived purity of antiquity on every level. Again, as in the Renaissance, philosophically, politically and aesthetically, this movement and the Enlightenment before it also had a significant effect on the appearance of letter forms, which we'll look at briefly in a bit. So James Moseley tells the story of how the sans-serif began to reappear in the work of the very prominent English neoclassical architect John Sohn, some of you may have heard of, under the influence of detailed drawings, which were made by his teacher George Dance II when dance traveled to Italy as a young man in the 1760s. So drawings like this one, which depict the lettering inscribed on the temple of Vesta Tivoli, which it just so happens was built during the Roman Republic. These meticulously measured drawings betray an interest not only in the letter forms, but also in their very classical underlying geometry. You can actually see tiny marks made by the stand of a compass in the center of the letters O and G. I don't know if you guys can see that from where you're sitting, but these letters are not sans-serif, per se. They actually have the tiny little wedge-shaped stroke endings, typical of the Republican serif letters that I mentioned earlier. But they're also similar to those letters in that they're almost completely monolinear and in the sense that the serifs are almost incidental to the letter shapes. From a distance, you can actually hardly see them. Can anybody see serifs on those from where you're sitting? Yeah? Okay, but they're small, right? My point stands. So the young John Sohn later not only made careful copies of his teacher's drawings, but then himself went to Italy to study and make drawings of the architecture as his teacher had done a quarter-century before. Then a few years after his return to England in 1780, he began to use a quite distinctive uppercase sans-serif lettering style, both in the labeling of his drawings and, most importantly, in his proposals for the inscriptions on the buildings themselves, such as the one you see here, his elevation of the façade of the Nort County Jail, drawn in 1789. And you can see that he's not only using these sans-serif letters on the title of the drawing at the bottom in his kind of fancy label, but he's actually proposing to use these sans-serif letters for the design of the inscription above the door as well, where it says the county jail. And again, you can see he's got the interpoints, I mean, on either side of the word, but still, you know, be instead of you, etc. And as James Moseley points out, the letters used by some in this context, unlike those on George Dance's drawing of the Tivoli inscription are unmistakably sans-serif and character. They're less geometrically constrained, and they're more organic and informal, but they still very much possess the feel of Roman capital letters, as I said, the V instead of U and the interpoints. But most significantly, these also very closely resemble and form the very first sans-serif type, which would be issued some 40 years later by William Caslon. A couple of details worth dwelling on for a moment. Glad to see you're all paying attention. I put these things in for a reason. So a couple of details that I think it's worth dwelling on for a minute are two deviant forms that Sone's lettering makes rather interesting and persistent use of. Neither the double curved leg of the R, so it going like that, nor the doubled back vertical stroke, sorry vertical stem on the G, where it goes like that, are Roman in origin. But you might remember that double curved R from the metal plate and cornwall that we looked at a few minutes ago. The construction of the R, by this point, is easy enough to comprehend as a form that was typical of the modern faces of the time. But the treatment of the G is far more curious. The lack of a horizontal bar is consistent with the inscriptional model. In fact, we saw such a G in George Dance's drawing of the Vesta inscription, the G was sort of a semi-circle and then a straight line that ticked up from the baseline. But the G being constructed in such a way that the main round stroke curves upward from the baseline and then sharply doubles back to form a stem is a whole other matter. Again, this would appear to betray the influence of the modern face, maybe. It's as though Sone has perhaps perceived the hairline weight horizontal bar of a typical modern face G, which would be very, very thin and rest on top of the heavy vertical stroke, not as a structural element, but as a serif and thus removed it. But what makes this truly interesting is that actually, as far as I know, no modern face up to this point actually had a G constructed in that way. The G of Baskerville and later Ditto, which you see in the upper left, both featured a small spur at the corner where the lower round stroke straightens to become the stem, you can see there beside the R. But it's not until the much later modern faces, which you see in an example of in the upper right, perhaps even the fat faces of a quarter century later, that the stem of the G is constructed in the way that Sone's appears to be in 1789, doubling back to the baseline. A possible contemporary source for construction like this is the script form of the upper case G, which you see in the lower right. But heaven knows why Sone would incorporate such a feature into this style of lettering. Maybe it was just a peculiarity of his own handwriting that carried over into his lettering. The only other precedent for this kind of construction that I'm aware of is the late unsealed pre-Carolingian form you see on the bottom left in those fifth century rustic and early unsealed hands. But again, I can't begin to speculate as to how this might have found its way into Sone's otherwise essentially classical lettering. Anyway, if it seems like I am paying undue attention to a minor curiosity here, please have patience, because we will be seeing this upper case G again. So from this point forward through the last quarter of the 18th century and into the first decade of the 19th, upper case sans serif lettering begins to appear in a wide range of contexts. And although not all of them are architectural, they do seem to be consistently associated with antiquity. These upper case sans serifs are generally looked quite similar to what you see here, either shaded like this one or plain. Now the vogue for this letters of this style, sorry, for letters of this style in Europe coincided with and was certainly helped along by the Napoleon-inspired Egyptomania of the time. And as they became more popular and entered the canon of sign writing, James Mosley cites several references from the period to this new style of block letter, which was becoming known as Egyptian. Egypt, of course, having been one of the three major ancient societies, Egypt, Greece and Rome, interest in all of which was at a high during the neoclassical era. And as you can see, these Egyptians were very much in the style of Sohan's lettering. This is an engraving, but this particular shaded style makes its way into type very early, oddly always in smaller sizes, and persists throughout the century. So what all this brings us to, nearly two millennia after its appearance in lettering, is finally the Latin sans serif's migration into type in William Caslon Jr.'s 1816 two-line English Egyptian, which you finally see here. Now it's like 20 minutes after I first mentioned it. Two-line English just for your information is about 28 point. So those are often spoken of as somewhat clumsy and unresolved and granted or maybe a little unsure of themselves. Caslon's letters also have a quiet forthrightness and simplicity about them, I think. And most importantly, they clearly evoke the inscriptional heritage that we've been talking about all this time, which the choice of Egyptian as a name places beyond the shadow of a doubt. You can see it in the geometrically circular O and C in the narrow proportion of the S and in the overall variety of letter widths, as well as in the straight leg of the R, which notably is more closely related to the typical Roman form than the one in John Sohan's lettering. And another possible reflection of the inscriptional heritage implied by this first sans serif type from Caslon is the fact that it consisted only of an uppercase. But you probably knew I was going to say that. So that takes care of the uppercase, at least to this point. But we still don't have a text style to talk about here yet. Where is the sans serif lowercase? Finding precedence for it up to this point has been kind of an exercising grasping at straws, but I'll show you what's been found so far. This image of an inscription from 1748 found in a grotto in Stourhead, England is the namesake of James Moseley's book. Again, it's called The Nymph in the Grotto. It has a lowercase, but rather than being a true sans serif, as we imagine them, its stroke weights are so heavily modulated that it's essentially a serif's modern face, with its already barely there serifs removed. There's none of the implied monolinearity, which is the other hallmark of the true sans serif. They're very rarely actually monolinear, but there's sort of implication or effort towards monolinearity that's kind of inherent to them. You can even see little serifs on all the s's in the bottom two lines, and as well on the uppercase a's. So it does look fairly intentionally like the serifs have been removed, but I'm not 100% certain that. I mean, it's not consistent, and I'm not sure that they couldn't have maybe worn away. Who knows? So either way, as sans serif lowercases go, this one is non-committal at best. One can say something like the opposite about the lowercase in this 1765 New England gravestone inscription. It's pretty clearly monolinear, but in this case, it has tiny vestigial serifs. It could almost be the lowercase of those Republican letters that we saw earlier transcribed by George Dance in his drawing. And where those tiny serifs don't appear, it kind of seems like they just were skipped rather than willfully omitted. The final and only convincing example of a pre-typographic sans serif lowercase is again one cited by James Mosley in the maps and drawings of William Gell's 1810 book, The Itinerary of Greece. Not surprisingly, a work referring to antiquity. Most of the examples in these illustrations look like the top one here, with an implied stroke modulation that's achieved by a second echo stroke. I don't know if you can see that from the back, but they're these sort of double stroke construction letters, and it kind of pulls them away from being monolinear. But in one instance, there's no denying that we're looking at a fully intentional sans serif lowercase in the word heap of stones in the bottom image. These solid monolinear and decidedly unserif letters drawn by William Gell in 1810 may still be the earliest true example of a sans serif lowercase. But as an isolated example, and as handsome as convincing as these lowercase letters are, they seem unlikely to have had any bearing on the look of the upper and lowercase types that would begin to be cut some 20 odd years later, and sadly are probably best regarded as a bit of a one-off. This is unfortunate because the letters we're going to see would probably benefit from having these as a model. Unfortunately, very few lettering or sign writing manuals from this period survived to tell us otherwise. And if anybody knows of any, please let me know because I'm on constant search for them. And after searching through several large collections of ephemera from this period, I was quite surprised to find no other examples, though of course it's entirely possible they're out there and I just haven't found them yet. But from the research I've done so far, it seems that not only was Stanley Morrison justified in describing the sans serif lowercase as an invention of the 19th century, it appears to have been a purely typographic invention at that, which I should point out is highly uncommon at this stage. Most type forms up to this point are based significantly on an existing lettering model, which then makes its way into type. So it's a pretty curious thing and I'm constantly in search of things to prove me wrong about that. So the only other possible pre-typographic models for the sans serif lowercase are really just theoretical ones. Prior to the 19th century, three processes for rendering letters came into use, which even if they didn't directly shape the typographic sans serif lowercase, certainly may have suggested or at least helped to prepare people for the idea of monolinear letter forms. The engraving beeran, the lithographic crayon, and the pencil are all inherently monolinear drawing tools, which require stress to be consciously added to letters if desired rather than imposing it on them as the broadening pen, the pointed pen, and the flat brush all do in their different ways. And all three of these new writing tools came of age in the years before the return of the sans serif. And although copper engraving had been in use for centuries by this point, in engravings of the late 18th century, we begin to see quite frequently the signature of the engraver and other incidental pieces of text written in a style that has no modulation of stroke weight at all, like these examples. You can see in the word Florence on the left and in the words J pass sculpt on the right there's just no effort to make these look like they have any kind of fix and thins. They're just unabashedly monolinear. Also this example from a fragment of a 1799 drawing by the very well-known satiric artist James Gilray. The lettering in the bottom right appears to be not only effectively monolinear, but also without serifs. Now, although these may seem like insignificant examples, they seem to occur frequently enough as to have become an accepted practice around this time. So the narrative we've been following up to now explains how the sans serif re-entered our graphic vocabulary, culminating in this. The first sans serif type, which we saw a few minutes ago, cut by William Caslon the fourth in 1816. Pappy 200th birthday, Caslon, two-line English Egyptian. But like Gell's lower case, Caslon's type seems to have been something of an isolated incident. There's apparently no evidence that this type was actually used in print until much later, or at least no such evidence has yet been found. Although it was shown periodically by the future owners of the foundry after it left Caslon's hands in 1819, it clearly had little impact. It would be 16 years before another sans serif type would appear in a founder's specimen. And the 19th century sans serif as it emerged in 1832 was an altogether different beast from Caslon's two-line English Egyptian and its classical lineage. A sans serif type with this particular kind of pedigree would not appear again for another hundred years. So to comprehend this new breed's formal rather than conceptual origins, we don't need to look nearly as far afield as ancient Rome. No doubt the most significant influence on type at this point, both technically and visually, was the arrival of the Industrial Revolution. Everything was changing and typography was no exception. The mass production of goods enabled by the myriad technological advances of the day necessitated the creation of a mass market for those goods and the advertising industry was born. The urban landscape became dominated by posters and littered with handbills. And in order to keep up with the level of graphic impact and novelty coming from woodcut printing and the fledgling technique of lithography, new types were needed, types of a kind which founders had never before produced. These new graphic demands necessitated the liberation of display typography from the dominion of the book and essentially forced the invention of several major and countless minor new type styles. These had to be big and bold in order to grab the attention of passersby. And increasingly, they also had to be novel to make every message stand out from every other message. Sound familiar? Such types needed to speak the emphatic new visual language of commerce. The quiet and venerable voice of culture would not do. So the first type style which appeared to address this need within the first decade of the 19th century was the fat face, which you can see in the top two lines of this poster in italic on the top and then Roman caps below it. It's essentially a modern face with a contrast between the weight of its thicks and thins radically exaggerated. This seemed to do the job for a time, but it wasn't long before the desire to pack ever more ink into every square inch of type resulted in the design of the slab serif, which is what you see in the rest of the large type on this poster. The first slab serif was initially shown as an uppercase by Vincent Figgins circa 1817, and it was followed by a lowercase around 1821. This is a sample from an 1824 specimen. So both the fat face and the slab serif were immediate runaway and continued successes. They permeated the specimen books of founders throughout England, Europe, and the United States at an incredible pace and stayed their remaining staples of 19th century typography for the better part of the century. In this context, it's a little wonder that Kazzlan's Egyptian never quite caught on. It was too big, too bold, and for the time too starkly unadorned to be used in book typography, but at the same time it was too small and most importantly too quiet for this new kind of display work. It simply lacked the density to stand up against the intense blackness of the fat faces and slab serifs of the time, a blackness that was needed to provide sufficient contrast with the ornamented types, which were multiplying in number and variety by the day and which had come to completely dominate display typography. I kind of wish I could do a second master's degree all about these because they're so amazing. So the 19th century sans serif as it would appear in 1832 could not be accused of having this problem. It shared the slab serif's blackness, but because its forms were so much simpler and its counters weren't enclosed by great blocky serifs, it was much more immediately legible and could achieve a kind of density and impact that just isn't possible with serifs getting in the way. Perhaps because of this, it was also initially most often cut in a far more condensed proportion than the fat faces and slab serifs of the time, which were fairly squarish. So its bareness and density and height meant that it was able to shout louder than any other style and made the sans serif the ideal poster type. Now, aside from the obvious difference in weight, the most critical difference between Kazan's Egyptian and this new breed of sans serif lay in its internal proportions in the relative widths of individual letters. So as we've seen, Kazan's types share the elegant classical proportions of Roman inscriptional capitals, like the ones you see here. These aren't Roman inscriptional capitals, but they're based on that model. These are from an old style typeface whose uppercase proportions are based on that model. The letters vary in width from quite narrow to quite wide, as you can see, because the forms were based on the simple geometry of the square of the circle in the triangle. The variety in letter widths that this produced also carried through the lower case, as you can see in this cut of garamond, and as it was developed through the 15th and 16th centuries. And this kind of variation in the widths of letters within one typeface remained standard practice right up until Baskerville effectively invented the modern face in the middle of the 18th century. So although his types are generally referred to as transitional, they actually introduced the two defining features of the modern face, a vertical as opposed to oblique angle of stress in the relationship of thicks and thins. And of greater relevance to this discussion, a much more uniform approach to the relative widths of letters. As you can see here in the second lines on both the upper and lower case sections, compared with the old style above, the widths of letters start to become much more similar to each other, more rationalized, more regular. And both of these qualities reflect the effect of enlightenment rationalism on letter forms. Another tongue twister. Reflect the effect of enlightenment rationalism. Then the fully modern types, which followed on from Baskerville, took both of these qualities to their logical extremes, from those of the Ditos through Badoni and into the various ubiquitous modern faces of the 19th century. You can see an example of the proportions here in a contemporary cut of a Dito in the third lines. In addition to the extreme stroke contrast, notice how differences, sorry how the differences in letter width in the top lines of each section have been almost completely erased in the third lines and how radically different a pattern this creates in a line of type. So these proportions were then inherited by their tough new cousins, the fat face and the slab serif, but most importantly also by the newest and toughest member of the family, the sans serif, as it appears circa 1832, which as I've said is an altogether different beast from Caslon's very civilized Egyptian. So one more quick thing I should mention before we get into looking at the types is the quagmire of nomenclature. This new style comes to be described in an insane cacophony of ways and I won't go into the details or provenances of those now because that could be actually literally a whole other talk, but suffice it to point out that of the 15 variations that you see here, the nine at the top before the space are all just from England alone. The other six are shared among the other main countries of the sans serif's development, the US, Germany or the states which would later become Germany and France. So without further ado, let's look at the types. Finally, right? So as I mentioned, the first sans serif types after Caslon's Egyptian arrived with a bang 16 years later in 1832. Now I'm not sure what was in the water that year, but no less than four different foundries on two continents showed their various brands, all in uppercase only likely for the first time, all in that same year. In England, William Therogood's Fan Street foundry showed their compressed heavy grotesque in one large size only, but with two related styles, one plain and one insized. I'm just showing the plain one here. And Vincent Figgins brought out his sans serif in four different sizes ranging from about 96 point all the way down to 10 point. I've listed the actual sizes on the captions, but as I talk about them where it's relevant I'll just give you the point size equivalent because most of you probably don't know how big a two line great primer is or a five line pika. And I probably don't either. So these were all of a more square proportion and generally lighter in weight than the Therogood example we saw previously. In fact, the two seem to be almost entirely unrelated visually, though Therogood in the previous slide shows so few letters it's hard to compare them to any great extent. It is interesting to note that they have opposing approaches to the leg of the R that most revealing of features. Therogood uses the modern curved leg and Figgins here uses his own slightly awkward take on the more classical straight variety. The most critical form to mention here though is of course the uppercase G. Therogood doesn't show one in this year, but the G shown by Figgins in his two smaller sizes should look very familiar. It's that same strange form drawn by Johnson nearly 50 years earlier. Now, although visually Figgins' types owe very little else to the Roman inscriptional tradition, I think we can agree these are very much children of the industrial age in every other respect, the presence of this G makes the ultimate source of these forms very clear. And although alternatives to this form of the G did arise and proliferate quite early on, this one holds its own and persists quite widely for the remainder of the century. Established wisdom on the birth of the 19th century sans serif has regarded these two English founders as the definitive originators of the genre, but interestingly my research turned up two American examples from the very same year. Across the Atlantic and seemingly independently, the Boston type and stereotype foundry released a lightweight gothic, similarly squarish in proportion to Figgins, but in a text size only 10 point. It's a curious little face and was a surprising find. It's certainly more elegantly cut than its English counterparts. Its proportions do hint at the classical although they stop rather short of it, and the weight is even lighter than that of Kazlan's 1816 Egyptian. And the different treatment of the G here is also worth noting. It's the opposite of Figgins' style, this one having a horizontal bar, but no vertical stem. So as possibly the earliest example of the American usage of the term gothic to describe a sans serif in type, this hardly fits the image of compressed blackness that that word conjures up. Though in all likelihood this term was in general used to describe sans serif lettering before it entered type, much as the term Egyptian is thought to have been in England, most likely a term from the sign writing trade. So the second American example from this same year still in 1832 is less surprising. It's called gothic condensed and it appears in an 1832 specimen of the New York Foundry Connor and Cook. It's certainly more gothic in character than Boston's offering and only slightly more elegant in form than the English examples. It's shown in three large poster sizes from 96 to 288 point. So a lot of what we're looking at, some of them will be metal types, but at this point a good number of them are probably wood types because they're so large. Then in 1833, England's Blake and Stevenson show their sans serifs in a total of five sizes, three somewhat ornamented and two plain. And this is the plain type. It's about 120 point. These are a little less condensed than Therogoods and very black with quite tiny counters on letters such as the A, B, and R. They're also an early example of what becomes a quintessential trait of 19th century sans serifs, the abrupt thinning of horizontal strokes in tricky areas to allow the overall mass of the letter to remain heavy without the counters completely filling in. This will typically be seen on such letters as the uppercase A, E, B, and R and the lowercase A and E letters that are sort of divided in half usually. But in this case, somewhat awkwardly, only the A really receives this treatment, maybe just slightly the H. You can see the difference in weight between the middle strokes of the A and then the E, R, and B. It's a little indecisive this stage. So then the year 1834 saw a major development. The first attempts at a sans serif lowercase, one from each side of the Atlantic. So Therogood, who we heard from in the very first slide, in addition to having augmented his grotesque selection with five new sizes all the way down to eight point, and now including an uppercase G, which is lacking a horizontal bar in the sewn style, also showed a lowercase with the 84 point size. But he doesn't seem to have been entirely convinced of its potential. It was shown as Communicate in 1834, Communion in 1848, and Common in 1868. One is inclined to wonder whether he actually got the whole alphabet. And the rest of the English market seems to have shared Therogood's skepticism, because although this was the first English sans serif lowercase to be shown, it would also be the last for nearly 40 years. Phyllis Handover, Phyllis, quipped that Therogood may have demonstrated with this attempt that a legible sans serif lowercase simply wasn't possible, thereby discouraging anyone else in England from trying to make one. Be that as it may, Johnson and Smith of Philadelphia, on the other hand, showed a very condensed lowercase in two sizes in the same year. And it was to be the first of many from the United States, which along with Germany from this point forward becomes the locus of the sans serif's development until much later in the century. And this is something that has been kind of, was a bit of a surprise as I started doing this research and became a bit of a mission for me because the previously written history of sans serif letters has always been very Anglo-centric, very focused on England being the source and kind of locus of the sans serif, and I found that to be very much not true, as you'll see. So this was not, however, the most auspicious beginning. I try not to impose my own subjective judgments on these things too much, but for me these faces really put the grotesque and grotesque, except that they're called Gothic, but you know whatever. These letters seem to range in quality from the clumsy to the awkward to the downright freakish, by which I think you know I mean that E. Therogood's lower case, though not exactly elegant, did fare a little better, though of course it was also on the clunky side, but either way it's been done. The sans serif lowercase has arrived, warts and all, and there is no going back. The year 1834 also brought the first sans serif italic, well more of an oblique among the 17 all uppercase sans serif types shown by Caslon and Livermore in 1834. These are two of the larger sizes, and you can see an example of a very similar italic uppercase in the pop-up case at the back from a different source, but it's a very similar cut. So in the ongoing narrative thread that is the uppercase G, it's worth noting here that the presence of both, sorry worth noting here the presence of both a horizontal bar and a vertical stem as well as the wedge-shaped bottom of that stem. This is a strategy borrowed from the slab serif style, which adds a bit of richness to the otherwise staunchly blocky, sorry staunchly blocky rendering of sans serif forms thus far, and as the style matures and becomes less simplistically and dogmatically monolinear, it's the kind of thing we begin to see a lot more of, but not for some time yet. This is just sort of a little hint of it. Okay, so then on the heels of those first two lowercase offerings, several others appeared quite quickly in the years that followed. In 1835, the New York Foundry of White Hagar, sorry I need another lozenge. My throat's just not cut out for public speaking. I used to do a radio program and it was just all croaking all the time. So right in 1835 the New York Foundry of White Hagar came out with this poster-sized Gothic condensed that was nearly identical to Johnson and Smith's from the previous year, which we just saw. And like the Connor and Cook example that I mentioned earlier, this also featured suspiciously similar text in his line showings, finished bountiful as distinct from Johnson and Smith's finished beautiful, but it's not a carbon copy. The first assumption when you see those kinds of similar settings from two foundries is that one foundry is just copied or possibly bought but most likely copied the face from the other foundry, but they are actually different forms. There are subtle differences from the Philadelphia original and the larger size and the smaller size is quite appreciably different, although sadly it's not much more pleasant to look at. Significantly 1835 also saw the first European sans-serif, complete with a lower case no less, from a foundry called Gottlieb Haase-Zona of Prague. And this is a foundry which seems to have been largely serving the German market, although German was apparently very commonly spoken in Prague during this period as well. And when I say Germany, I mean Prussia and the other states that would become Germany in 1871, Germany as such didn't exist at this time. In any event, it came in the form of this large poster type, which is about 84 point, probably wood, and very tellingly it uses Therogood's English term. It's called grotesque, spelled with a Q-U-E, not a very Germanic spelling. There's a definite resemblance between the forms of this tight face and those of its namesake. The lower case E is particularly telling. I don't know if any of you guys recognize this from that early grotesque from Therogood. But this is clearly an original creation, as witnessed by that extraordinarily wacky, non-descending double story G in the third line in the word Konigsborn. It sort of looks like you could use that as an ad for like an optical store or something like that. Also worth noting is the S. It's shaped with those pothook-like terminals, bears a definite resemblance to the uppercase S of Figgins' 1832 sans serres, which I'm sure you guys can all totally visualize right now. I'd flip back there, but it's too many slides. This would become the typical German form for quite some time, even though it did actually originate in England. Finally, the year 1837 brought two slightly more accomplished looking offerings from the United States, both also in wood types. I never get the pronunciation of this right. I think it's Debo foundry, showed this extremely black and compressed upper and lowercase face, which takes the slit-like counters and tight spacing of the style to an absolute extreme. And given these characteristics, I think it's surprisingly well handled and quite charming. It also reminds me of something you might have seen in like the 1980s. I don't know. I think it's pretty awesome. And then from the New York foundry of George Bruce, a face that is somewhat lighter in weight and thus even more elegant, especially the ingenious approach to the bottom curve of the T, which enables the spacing to appear more even than a conventionally curved bottom stroke wood, because it pushes the letter next to it further away, while maintaining a bit more character, clarity, and finesse than a purely straight T would have. They always just look really strange in text. So this is a quintessentially American form, and so is the treatment of the S in both of these examples. It's very different from its European counterpart that we were just looking at in the much more monolinear character of the stroke, and in the pure horizontality of its stroke endings that mirror the very horizontal one in the E. So this marks roughly the end of the first stage in the evolution of sans-serif types, particularly the lower case. Of course, new faces continue to be cut and sizes continue to be added to existing ones, but the initial burst of invention starts to taper off around this time. Looking at them as a group, there are a few things worth mentioning. First, there's no getting around the look of these early types. Apart from a few examples, the upper and lower case sans-serif of the 1830s is by and large not such a pretty sight. Our natural inclination is to assume that these forms look unresolved because they are, that they stand crudely at the beginning of a linear process of refinement, but I think it's important to ask whether this is in fact true, and to consider whether they look the way they do by design, and not because the people who made them simply couldn't do any better. In fact, we know that this is clearly not the case. Every type catalog of the period shows a huge array of ornamented types that are nothing short of virtuosic, both in design and in execution, and the use of the term grotesque is another indicator that this was a conscious style, rather than an unsuccessful series of attempts to conquer the monolinear serifless letter form. Granted, in these forms, we do see some evidence of struggle with simply making a bold, condensed sans-serif work. Anyone who's a type designer in the audience is going to know that, but it's also interesting that despite the presence more than a decade earlier of wider and more resolved forms in the slab serif that could have been used as a model, and very well might have been in the case of later grotesques, the only sans-serif lower cases that were attempted up to this point were of the bold, condensed variety, the most difficult kind to resolve, and one for which there really was no precedent. So this may have been because initially the sans-serif was needed to contrast with other types, as we saw an example of earlier in the style of a day, and this wouldn't have worked if the sans had followed the slab too closely in form. And maybe because the sans-serif did go through a process of collective refinement later on in its life, we're justified in perceiving these early forms as crude, lesser versions of the later ones, but it seems to me that this later refinement likely happened because the style caught on and began to be adapted for different uses which motivated its refinement and not because it was intended to perform that way from the beginning. Second, it becomes apparent that the story of the early sans-serif in type essentially takes place in three countries, England, Germany, as it existed at the time, and the United States. We see occasional contributions from other countries, but overwhelmingly its development appears to have occurred just in these three, or largely in these three. So we can only speculate as to why this is, but there are a few possible obvious reasons. The simplest is that these three were the most industrialized economies of the time, especially England, and all three had major printing and type founding industries, driven by major publishing industries, which drove the need for new types. England was the seat of the neoclassical revival, which brought these forms back into the graphic vocabulary as we now know, so we know why it caught on there, as to why the lowercase had no life there until much later on, handovers quip about thorough goods ungainly lowercase aside. This is likely because initially the sans-serif is very much a display letter, and at this stage the English tradition of display typography is, by and large, still a classically inspired all caps tradition. As you can see, there would typically be precious little lowercase, if any, on posters such as this one, or on shop signs, title pages, etc. Germany, on the other hand, had a clear use for the lowercase in display settings, one rarely and with very good reason sees black letter set in all caps. And as for the United States, sorry. Sometimes it's late at night, you're making these slides, you get a little punchy. If you'll forgive the cliché, the pioneering spirit of this newly independent country, no doubt heightened the appeal of anything novel or contemporary looking, and especially rugged. Maybe the sans-serif both helped to graphically cleave the present from the past, and could be made into something uniquely American. Either way, throughout the 1840s, the sans-serif repertoire in general continues to expand, new types tending to become smaller in size, lighter in weight, and less condensed in width. So because my focus here is the evolution of the sans-serif into a viable text type, my concern is mainly with its development as a full upper and lowercase style, and not so much with its many all caps and ornamented variations, though there were certainly a wonderful great many of these. With regard to its development into a text style, very little happened in the 1840s though. For whatever reason, most of the new faces were uppercase only. So the next real leaps forward in the process began in the 1850s, roughly 20 years after the first sans-serif types were introduced. They were two parallel developments which seemed to take place, at least initially independently, in Germany on the one hand, and in the United States on the other. On the German side, the starting point for this next stage is with one of the foundries we saw a lowercase from in the 30s. In 1847, Prague's Gottlieb Haas-Zona, who had that crazy double story G that was just didn't descend below the baseline, they showed the first upper and lowercase sans-serif in a smallish size, which is unspecified but appears to be about 18 point. In fact, at this point, they are still the only European foundry I found that have shown a lowercase at all. And this single cut appears unnamed, just numbered, and isolated on a page of ornamented types. Although it's still quite condensed, it's far lighter in weight than any other upper and lowercase style to date. So its forms are generally more rounded and open, but are still a bit awkwardly rendered, as is the relationship of the very heavy uppercase to the lighter lowercase. But the stroke ends of the E and the R both possess a subtle inward curve that we haven't seen before. And this is a feature that becomes utterly characteristic of the first wave of German upper and lowercase sans-serifs, roughly 10 years later, as well as the much later English ones. This showing those the solitary example of that style for about 10 years. So it's significant for that reason. Okay, detour. In the 19th century, typefaces often follow the pattern of new styles originating as display experiments and then working their way into the plain types. And consistent with that, right now we have to take a little detour through some ornamented faces to understand the next formal shift in the development of the German sans-serif. So our first stop on this detour is actually an English type from a year earlier than that previous one from Prague we were just looking at. This is Vincent Figgens' 1846 two-line pica rustic. That's about 24 point. Now, despite having said that the sans-serif lowercase had no life in England in the 1840s, and this is true of plain types, it does seem to have found a startlingly accomplished resolution in this ornamented face whose conceit is to be constructed of twisted and bent logs. According to the type historian Nicolette Gray, this style derived from contemporary wood engraving. So these forms may owe more to a lettering artist than to Figgens. But regardless, ironically, this is the most articulately rendered sans-serif lowercase we've seen so far. You know that adage about if you want something fast, give it to a busy person. It's like this is how you make a really good sans-serif lowercase you make it out of twisted and bent logs instead of just black and white. So anyway, it's significant here because its letter shapes appear to be translated almost verbatim into another style of ornamented type in Germany that we'll see in a minute. And from that into the beginnings of the early German sans-serif text style. So this ornamental rustic style definitely traveled to Germany and can be found in many specimen books. But more importantly, its influence can be found in a quintessentially German style, the upper and lowercase rounded shadow display types of a decade later. So this brings us to our next stop on the detour, briefly leaping forward a decade into the 1850s to look at this new rounded shadow style. So as far as I've seen, this was first shown by Carl Mayer's Dresler Shaggy Sarai of Frankfurt in 1857. So we're really leaping forward quite a bit. But it rapidly proliferated throughout many founder specimen books. It's not too heavy in weight, kind of normal in width, shown in small sizes from 8 to 14 point. And most importantly, it features a quite confident normal with lowercase. Again, before we've ever seen one in a plain type, even though it's now 1857, like I said, the 40s were quiet. So although it's less condensed and not constructed out of bent logs, the similarities between the forms of this tight face and those of the rustic are considerable. There's the way the sort of hook shaped terminals of the lowercase a, e, r and s curves subtly inward. There's the same bulbous bowl on the lowercase a and the same tightly enclosed counters on the lowercase e and s. So there's the rustic and there's the rounded shadow. Then within two years, no less than three German founders released extremely similar normal with upper and lowercase plain sand serifs in relatively small sizes, all called grotesque. We're seeing them all here at their largest size, which is roughly 14 point. So we're still in the late 1850s and this is a little confusing chronologically because we're going to have to leak back. But in 1858, Carl Mayer, who brought us the rounded shadow we just looked at, shows his text size grotesque just a year later in four sizes up to 14 point, which is shown in the top section. J.C. Bauer is a Bauer chagiserai, also a Frankfurt shows theirs in 14 point only in the middle in Latin. And then the next year, Edward Hanell follows suit with a similar although slightly more monolinear style in the same four sizes as Mayer and his 14 point cut is at the bottom. So I'm sure I don't have to point out how incredibly similar all these are. In fact, if I hadn't told you they were three different typefaces from three different founders, I'm not sure you would have thought so. They were still too bold to be used for regular text setting. In fact, by 1859, Bauer had renamed his versions Halbfeta grotesque modern, Halbfeta translating roughly a semi-bold. But they were a very clear first step in that direction and established a fundamentally early German sans serif style. So also notice the nature of Bauer's showing, as I mentioned, in the center. It's not just a paragraph of continuous text but it's in Latin and complete with FF and Fi ligatures. These were clearly beginning to be thought of as text types even if they weren't quite there yet. And although they've clearly struck out on their own, the relationship of these forms to those of the rounded shadow and rustic styles is to my eye quite clear and I hope you guys can see that too. One significant difference is in the lowercase a though, the bowl of which has lost that kind of bulbous shape and now slopes downward more like the Prague face from a decade earlier. And here are two slightly larger sizes from Bauer's renamed Halbfeta series of 1859 or semi-bold. By far the most crucial shift which has occurred here is that in all three faces we see the first use in a sans serif of the single story lowercase g, famously become a staple of German sans serif types and much later of other nations as well. The single story sans serif g is generally thought to have descended directly from the black letter lowercase g. Now why it enters the sans serif vocabulary at this point in time? One can only guess but it's interesting that its emergence coincides with the arrival of the first uniquely German sans serif types. Probably not a coincidence. It's also worth pointing out just because it's been a few minutes since I've mentioned an uppercase g that the one shown here is not the more typically sewn inspired kind with only a vertical stem but the combination of wedge shaped stem and horizontal bar first shown by Kazlon and the uppercase r in all cases has the same arched leg found in the rounded shadow face from which these seem to derive. Mayer and Bauer's faces in particular both feature an overall subtle modulation of stroke weight and not just in those junctions where we expect it so that they're there to allow the letter to still appear monolinear by pulling weight out where it would accumulate with printing. There's actually a kind of deliberate stress in these typefaces. This would be shared by other German sans serifs to follow and help to distinguish them from the American style which began to develop around the same time. So with that we can step out of our rustic inspired detour and we jumped ahead to the late 1850s so that you could see the direct lineage from that rustic ornamented style and now we can shift backwards a bit to take a look at what was going on outside Germany in the 1850s. So by the late 50s when that German sans serif lowercase was just getting started the American one in large sizes anyway was already quite well established. Alternatives to the extremely compressed and bold types of the 1830s and 40s had begun to be offered by several foundries. By 1853 New York's Bruce and White Foundries among others both offered types which were still very large and very bold but they were getting considerably less compressed and their shapes were becoming ever better resolved and more internally consistent following the examples set by the Bruce and Debo faces of the late 1830s. So in fact by this time the Bruce foundry had expanded their early Gothic condensed that rather nice face shown earlier as Festo into a family of at least six different sizes. As early as 1849 wood type manufacturers Wells and Webb were offering one of the first normal width upper and lowercase sans serif simply called Gothic in at least four sizes and even though these are still huge bold types they represent a critical point in the sans serif development because for the first time they're approaching more text friendly proportions if not weight. This same typeface shows up in a specimen of the White Foundry five years later in 1854 which also contains a very early extended upper and lowercase sans serif their Gothic extended and there's in the pop-up exhibition at the back there's examples from the mid 50s I believe of similar cuts to these from a different foundry. In 1855 Connor and Sons also of New York showed an amazingly prescient lightweight straight sided extra condensed Gothic in one size 24 point I believe and at this point we still have yet to see a sans serif lowercase of normal weight and width so this one seems both quite accomplished and quite ahead of its time. Now despite the fact that all caps faces of normal weight and width had been gaining popularity for a number of years in all three countries. Here's a quite accomplished German one with apologies for the wobbly image which was shown by Hanell in a range of 11 sizes in 1856. It's only in the later 1850s that such types begin to be given the same kind of real estate in American specimen books as their bold condensed counterparts but once they do they positively explode onto the scene and with a companion lowercase hot on their heels this appears to be the defining moment in the sans serif's development. So here's another normal weight and with all caps face this time again from the white foundry of New York and here's the first plain rounded upper and lowercase sans serif I found it's a pretty friendly looking face and only one large size again from the white foundry's 1858 specimen book and even though this is also a poster type I'm showing it because it contains a normal weight and with lowercase which is probably looking quite unfamiliar at this point because we haven't seen anything like it and you'll see why I'm showing this to you in a minute. So in much the same way as the years 1832 to 36 saw burst of invention which with the true arrival of sans serif types and multiple foundries all coming out with their respective versions in the same brief period the early 1860s brought with them a parallel kind of explosion during this period two american founders and two german founders at the very least all showed their own variations of the first real upper and lowercase sans serif text types you ready they were all of normal weight and width they were treated as serious families in a range of sizes from roughly five to 24 point and in them we see for the first time both the forms of the prototypical 19th century grotesque and the seeds of its myriad 20th century permutations so ladies and gentlemen without further ado I present you with the first true grotesques as we as we've come to think of them and as far as I can tell the earliest of the four founders to come out with a proper grotesque text type is not german and we already know it's definitely not british it came from the white foundry of new york so this specimen of their new upper and lowercase gothic types is dated 1860 but based on the frequency of the year 1862 that you can see in the showings it's more likely to have been cut in between those years but for a number of reasons that I won't bore you with I'm confident that it was definitely cut before 1862 and based on the gradual growth of this family as well as the range of normal with lowercase experiments in the various specimens from the white foundry we've just been looking at where you can sort of see this idea germinating failing future evidence to the contrary it seems almost definitive to me that this is in fact the first of the bunch when the full 1860 to 62 specimen book which these showings come from was released the gothic family was shown in seven sizes from a tiny five point up to 24 point each with a lowercase as well as a complete upper and lowercase related bold version called gothic number one which you can see in the lower half of this showing in the same range of sizes these faces to my eye can easily be seen to relate to those large bold wider types shown by wells and web in 1849 and then by white in 1854 although on a completely different scale and considerably more refined in particular the lineage of the lowercase a seems quite clear these are the first to be shown in this new normal with proportion and possibly the first examples with a teardrop shaped bowl since the 1830s in the new text size face however the tail of lowercase a curiously now features an eccentricity that is consistently the also somewhat strangely applied throughout both this family and the related bold version the presence of a corner where one would normally find a curve you can also see this in the top of the f the bottom of the t and the tail of the y can you guys see that from where you're saying super strange right as well as sorry the fact that this appears on several characters and in the bold as well for better or worse is very interesting evidence of a conscious effort to design a cohesive and unique family and in fact this may be among the earliest related bold designs parallel weights designed and released together not for instance a clarin and cast on the same body as a roman it was meant to coexist with which was the norm in this period of the 18th century these quirky square forms turn up in many catalogs for a while until they're finally whittled out later in the century which also belies the initial influence of this funny little typeface in fact a recent dish release that you might have seen called proto grotesque from the french foundry production type is based on these forms but as they discovered them recut in an 1883 specimen from the stuttgart foundry bowering company but perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of this new grotesque which we really haven't seen yet perhaps because of the smaller size they're being cut at is the abrupt and extreme finning of curved strokes as they approach acute angled junctions which you can see in the lower case a b d p and q and the h m n r and u while the rest of the letters remain essentially monolinear this is a truly genre-defining feature in which i'm sure you will all recognize from the many later grotesques that we all know and love and this is the first time we've seen it there are a few inconsistencies among the caps and numerals especially that persistently revealing g which sometimes appears with a bar in the smaller sizes where is it there in the word engraving you can see a different g and then the larger sizes in gothics it's the barless kind but these seem to be left over from the face's previous life as a kind of somewhat incoate collection of uppercase only types and of course i can't help but point out the form of the g that's still with us here as the sans serif takes its great leap forward so likely the second group of the spring second of the group to spring to life our next family comes from frankfort's dresler shaggy serif the same one that was owned by carl mayor which was taken over in 1859 by ferdinand flinch who i think has just like the zippiest name in typeface design the specimen book it came from is dated 1861 but the sheet on which this family itself appears shows the founder's address as being one which they only occupied after 1863 so we can confidently say that this showing comes after that of charles white you can see why it's such a project to do this research because like accurately dating these things is often a nightmare um like white flinch added these new upper and lower case for tasks to an existing family in this case those narrower bolder faces produced by mayor five years before in the late fifties which we looked at a few minutes ago during our detour and which you can see in the two smaller sizes here they make conspicuously strange bedfellows on the full specimen page for this family mayors earlier faces are shown as the four smaller sizes with their straight backed lowercase a single story lowercase g uppercase g with a horizontal bar and slightly condensed proportions just as they were shown in 1858 and then there's the flinch contribution shown in the two larger sizes here from the word summer down to the bottom um this was also cut in a total of six larger sizes from 18 point none and these feature a double story lowercase g a lowercase a with a curving tail as well as a teardrop shaped bowl a barless uppercase g and then the abrupt stroke modulation which are all now familiar to us from the faces of charles white so although the direction of influence here seems fairly clear cut i find these types from flinch to be particularly lovely examples and in many ways handled with greater finesse than those of the white foundry especially distinctive are the pronounced wedge shaped stem of the lowercase b and this just like marvelous lowercase a it's got so much character the lowercase g is also quite elegantly cut though it's not shown here so you just have to take my word for that also interesting is that flinches forms are less monolinear overall than those of white especially in the numerals um the soft vertical stress in these types is clearly reminiscent of the faces we saw from the other frankfort foundry bowers larger larger held feta types in 1859 and several of the forms make me wonder if a more modulated face perhaps a clarendon or even a modern face might have been used as a model for this lowercase but not in the w obviously and of course you know what i'm going to say about this letter still following us around like a pesky shadow um this bold version was a little complicated to date and quite befuddling for other reasons i won't take the time to go into here um but it appears to have come from another new york foundry james connor's sons in 1863 or 1864 uh the specimen this comes from appears to be rife with electrotyped copies of the white and flinch faces in some showings they're even intermixed with each other but this bold is the one showing that hadn't yet appeared anywhere else that i've seen so far so i'm including it um the caps are pretty idiosyncratic with their significantly thinner horizontal middle strokes um and that becomes of course another quintessential trait as the 19th century grotesque evolves the curly tails of the lowercase a and y are also quite distinctive um but whether these are an original design or simply copied from another founder whose specimens i just haven't yet examined remains to be seen as james connor was the person who will go down an infamy as having perfected the process of electrotyping matrices the use of which for copying typefaces he heartily condemned later in life but this specimen book may shall we say predate his uh change of heart on the matter um and then the final although not necessarily last contributor to this critical stage of development is the light zig foundry shelter in gizika uh the specimen book that these showings come from is dated 1862 to 67 and shows a large number of san serifs and styles quite different from this one ranging from somewhat bold and condensed to bold and extremely condensed but the ones we're looking at right now are their normal width style the grotesque schrift in mitgeminen and gminen means lowercase uh what we see here is a family of a very similar kind to that shown by flinch um like flinch in a uh of a total 10 sizes the smallest form are in that same purely german style of the late 1850s that we saw in our detour and the larger six are of the possibly more american style so again we see the same dichotomy between the straight back lowercase a and single story g and the smaller older sizes and then the double story g and a with a tail and tear drop shaped bowl in the newer larger ones these are similar but by no means identical to the faces shown by flinch and the specimen does include a note positively insisting that the types have been poured for from original matrices um the dating of this particular sheet is a little tricky and still unresolved um so it's possible that these types could predate those of flinch but because the specimen book contains sheets from as late as 1867 it's also entirely possible that they're later bit of a question mark um and i just want to add that this past week uh your fellow bay area typophile steven coals who's in berlin at the moment so unfortunately isn't able to be here tonight uh dug up what might be two further american examples of very early lightweight grotesque text types that may add to this part of the story um as he found them online i have to locate hard copies of the specimens that these appear in and look at them in person to try to determine whether they're dated correctly and do indeed fit into this part of the narrative but they're potentially interesting addition because although they clearly relate to some of the other styles we've just seen they're also lighter in weight and feature the first non-lining sans serif figures that i've seen in grotesques of this period so stay tuned on that to be continued um regardless the notion that the moment represented by these four iterations of the grotesque which i'd argue we see for the very first time clearly articulated in these four families would in fact come to define the 19th century sans serif is reinforced by the fact that what follows it reads like something of a post script um for the most part the contributions to the grotesque which take place over the remainder of the 19th century are minor variations on in additions to this newly established style um they refine its basic forms and provide models for the components of the major sans serif families of the early 20th century but those essential forms remain largely unchanged from here on in there are however still a few significant developments and it is at this point that the story finally shifts back to britain that took a while didn't it as i said earlier um all cap styles had continued to flourish in england since their introduction there in 1832 with almost every foundry developing permutations ranging from the bold and condensed to the light and extended and every possibility in between in a full range of text and display types um and in many cases far more refined actually than their german and american counterparts um get still the only sans serif lowercase to emerge from england thus far had been thorough goods a board of attempt of 1834 but in 1870 this suddenly changes and oddly enough the process begins with a lightweight condensed italic one more lawson should get me there we're almost there you can see it in the middle of this slide um from hw kazlon and company but although this was the first lowercase of its kind partial credit for its appearance has to go to the fan street foundry who showed an almost identical uppercase only italic face in the previous year which you can see at the top it's as though kazlon simply produced a lower case to match interesting here is the choice of an oblique double story lowercase a instead of the more cursive single story form in the showing below which is from vnj figgins um also in 1870 it's similarly proportioned but utterly different in feel it's more of a pseudo sans serif italic it's far more script liking character than we'd expect a sans serif italic to be it even features ball like uh sort of swells at its stroke endings implying the flow of ink from a pen and a greater degree of stroke modulation than the caps but amazingly those caps are again virtually identical to the ones from fan street in the top line type founders man they just love ripping each other off um i guess it's the sincerest form of flattery right um so for a little sweet revenge here's the fan street foundry's a very graceful 1874 answer to what a lowercase to match their italic caps should look like which for my money is actually the loveliest of the bunch however it wasn't until 1873 that britain produced its first new upper and lowercase sans serif roman types since 1834 just shy of 40 years later um but it seems like waiting out the growing pains of a new style paid off for the Edinburgh foundry of miller and richard in an 1873 specimen that you see here they show not one but two styles um in the upper showing a sans serif number one a lightweight condensed phase that's the upright companion to their sans serif italic of 1870 and very similar to the ones from caslon and fan street that we've just seen and in the lower showing their lovely normal weight and width grotesque number one these are both clearly descendants of the genre defining american and german faces of a dozen years previous but they're less eccentric and far more elegant than their clunkier forebears and in the case of grotesque number one um they're clearly cut for proper text setting um the next british entry of this decade is caslon's doric series which this bit of copy makes clear was no special initiative of theirs but merely responds to an overwhelming demand for a sans serif lowercase can you guys all read that the first sentence says many have been the applications we have received for doric or sans serif lowercase and we have been induced to commence the series so as to supply the want thus indicated it's pretty entertained to read the whole thing actually um but in the interest of time uh here it is another truly lovely elegant english grotesque and again shown in a literary paragraph rather than just graphic single line showings making the intended use of these types abundantly clear and here's a final gorgeous and quintessentially british example from about 1880 these are two of the sizes in 12 and 24 point from the slightly later grotesque number six family um by stevenson blake um as late and arriving as they are all of these final basic iterations of the genre the mature british style if you will still manage to make a real contribution to it i think um they've been refined to an extent that the word grotesque has at last become only a name and is no longer a description as well so this is the point at which my research has basically ended so far because from this point forward the founders of all three of these countries and now many others as well embarked on a period of such chaotic cross pollination that it becomes very difficult to pinpoint national styles anymore type specimen books suddenly ballooned in size and by the late 1880s each founder is showing between 25 and 40 pages of sans serif salon of every imaginable stripe uh the various styles we've seen emerging here multiplied and proliferated to such an extent that it's easy to understand why their view is anonymous for the most part they were still unnamed and they were often poorly organized um and by this time most founders were showing roughly the exact same mix of mismatched types probably just to ensure that their offerings covered the whole range of possible styles um i assume this is at least partly because the debut of mechanized typesetting in the mid 1880s brought with it the promise of redundancy for many founders and caused an intense scramble in the industry causing each founder to try to be all things to all people in order to stay afloat but what's clear is that by this point the sans serif was here to stay it was no longer relegated to the display section of type catalogs um these often disparate collections of sans serif types were down given not only substantial showings but also much more prominent placement in type specimen books now often appearing before the slab serifs and clarindons that they had previously always followed for me leafing through these things for months and months it became very palpable the progression of where the sans serif's occurred in the sequence of the specimen books so just to illustrate the intercontinental cross-pollination i was talking about we're almost done um i just find this really amusing here's a typical example and believe it or not this really is typical more the rule than the exception at this stage um this very handsome type specimen from the chicago type foundry of martyr losing company is a perfect example among its various spreads of grotesque types we can recognize styles from the american white foundry although i believe to be fair that martyr loose started as a branch of the white foundry so we'll allow that that's where this came from but there are also other styles in this catalog which should now look very familiar for instance from the dressler foundry of frankfort under flinch and the edinburgh foundry miller and richard and i just included this page because i thought it was awesome um if you read the sample texts in the upper left uh home poets at the breakfast table the tear of sensibility has sailed many clams tough steak and weak coffee um and also i thought it was kind of i i think an early incidence or from what i've seen of um these big displays small caps which i thought were kind of cool um and then presumably it was the recognition of this mounting status of the sans serif as well as the total state of confusion of many sans serif families at this point that caused the major foundries which were still standing in the late 1890s to revisit reorganize and in several cases redraw the families now chaotically taking so much space up in their catalogs so after the frenzied reorganization of the type industry that took place in these last couple decades once the dust had settled the first decade of the 20th century saw the creation of a series of major new sans serif families which were a direct outgrowth of the faces of the 19th century there was bear told accidents grotesque this is actually the original spelling with a double c which i believe attempted to unify a collection of disparate designs for its various weights in about 1896 but you can still see the evidence of its different sources and the variation among those different weights today which trickled into helvetica as well for instance the presence of a tail on the lowercase a and lighter weights but not in the bolder weights although there are certainly practical reasons for a decision like this as well these are two of the more similar weights the medium and bold there's shelter in gizika's bright a grotesque which became the unofficial tight face of the bow house and which was beautifully revived earlier in this century by christian shorts of commercial type as ff bow by the way bright to just means wide then there were morris fuller benton's remarkable franklin alternate and news gothix from atf in 1902 to 1908 and again these really use the grotesque form as just a starting point to create something that as i said earlier to my eye is almost a completely new genre unto itself literally the american gothic and very much a 20th century style and then much truer to the pure grotesque style there was also schtempels reform grotesque from 1904 to 1907 and bowers venus also in 1907 but for my final image i wanted to leave you with this it's a mock advertisement from schtempels dedicated reform grotesque cursive specimen of 1910 so this is getting a specimen all to itself and it suggests reform grotesque as an ideal choice to characterize a classical music event and uses a classical centered layout to promote this essentially industrial age grotesque so no longer an anonymous nameless list at the back of a catalog by this point the grotesque has finally outgrown its status as a lowly jobbing face only fit to shout in the voice of commerce and is finally able to speak as the quiet venerable voice of culture as well thank you everybody still awake