The story of the designing of Caslon Oldstyle has been often told, yet a few brief facts may be of interest here.
EXAMPLE 482
There were two slightly different faces to many of the Caslon fonts. From the specimen pages in Luckombe’s “History of Printing,” published in 1770
Typefounding and printing had deteriorated in England, and the product of the printing press was pathetically poor (the author was surprised, in examining important volumes printed in England about 1700, at the consistently poor work of typefounder, compositor and pressman), when, in 1720, William Caslon, an engraver on metal, was called upon to cut a font of Arabic characters, to be used in printing a New Testament for the poor Christians in Palestine and Arabia. At the same time, for use at the foot of the proofs of his Arabic types, he cut his own name in Roman, pica size. (This was at the time when Benjamin Franklin was working as a journeyman at Watt’s printing office.)
The pica size, however, was not cast immediately. So far as is known, the size of Roman first to be cast by Caslon was that called “English” (about fourteen-point), which he cut in 1722. Additional sizes followed, and at about the period of his death, in 1766, there were at least thirty fonts of Roman (pearl to five-line pica), nineteen fonts of Italic, ten fonts of Black Text, and various fonts of Greek, Hebrew and other alphabets, together with more than a half-hundred fonts of flowers and bands.
The fonts that have been preserved to us, and that are purchasable, do not include all. There were Nos. 1 and 2 faces in nonpareil, brevier, bourgeois, long-primer, small-pica, pica, english and double-pica (two-line small-pica). The No. 1 face in each case was a trifle larger than that of No. 2, and a third face, still larger, was made in bourgeois and long-primer.
These faces were all shown, in honor of the memory of William Caslon and as a tribute to the merit of the type, in Luckombe’s “History of Printing,” published by Adlard & Browne, London, in 1770 (Example [482]).
It is probably the smaller and lighter No. 2 faces that have been preserved to us in the ten-point (long-primer) sizes and under. The lighter, more open eighteen-point (great-primer) Italic (Example [517]), so different from the Italic of the other sizes, is as Caslon made it. In some respects it is better than the Italic of other sizes.
While the general appearance of all sizes of the Roman is the same (and of the Italic also, with the exception noted), there are slight differences in details of design in the various sizes. For this reason, when Caslon Oldstyle is compared with the original letters, the comparison should be with the same size in each instance.
De Vinne, perhaps influenced by the prejudices and practices of nineteenth-century typefounders, in one of his books points out as defects in the original Caslon types features that typefounders and composing-machine makers are today restoring to the face as used in America. The “defects” were supposed to be: “Too long a beak to the f and j; unnecessary narrowness in the s and a, and in some capitals; too great width of the c, o and v.”