The “modern” tendency may be seen in certain features of the types designed by Baskerville, who printed his first book in 1757; but it is not nearly so pronounced as in Pine's “Horace,” engraved twenty-four years earlier. Baskerville's editions had an enormous vogue, not only in this country but on the Continent also, where they had considerable influence on the style of printing which then prevailed. Amongst those who felt this influence was Giambattista Bodoni, a scholar and printer of Parma, which city has lately kept the centenary of his death. To Bodoni more than anyone else the so-called “modern-face” is due. He cast a large number of founts, narrow in the “set” or width of the letters as compared with their height, and having the excessively fine lines and the close loops and curves which are characteristic of that face. Like Baskerville he printed his books with very great care on a spacious page in large and heavily-leaded type; and although an occasional protest was raised against the ugliness of his letter, his books caught the taste of his day, and his type was copied by all the English type-founders of the time. The new fashion completely drove out the older tradition, which dated from the very invention of printing; and from the closing years of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century books were printed almost exclusively in “modern-faced” type.
The older and more authentic letter had its revenge in 1843, when the publisher, William Pickering, arranged with his friend Charles Whittingham, the printer, to produce a handsome edition of Juvenal as a “leaving-present” for Eton; and the book was to be printed from the discarded type first cut by William Caslon about the year 1724. Prior to that time English printers had gone to Holland for most of their type; but Caslon's types surpassed in beauty any hitherto used in England, and the best English printing had been done from them till near the end of the century, when they were driven out by the “modern” face. Before the Juvenal was issued, a romance entitled “The Diary of Lady Willoughby,” dealing with the period of the Civil Wars, was also printed in old-faced type cast from William Caslon's matrices, so as to impart to the book a flavour of the period at which the diarist was supposed to be writing. It was the day of Pugin and of the Gothic revival; and the public taste was won by the appearance of this book, printed in old-fashioned guise in the selfsame type which had been cast aside half a century before. Type-founders are generally quick to follow one another's lead in new fashions; and before long every type-founder in England had cut punches and cast letter in that modified form of Caslon's old-faced type which printers call “old-style.” Mr. Adeney of the Reigate Press has used an “old-style” fount in the extract from Camden's “Britannia” reproduced on a very small scale on page 57. The “old-style” character and the points in which it is either like or unlike the more authentic old-faced letter may be seen by comparing the two. The lower of these founts is the “old-style” :
The favour which the revived “old-face” and the new “old-style” letter won for themselves in the middle of last century has suffered no diminution since. The ugly “modern-face,” which we owe to Bodoni, is still used almost exclusively for certain classes of work and alternatively for others; so that the printer is bound to be familiar with all three. For book-printing at the present day the “old style” and the “old-face” are used much more than the modern.
During the fifty years that followed the revived use of Caslon's types by the Whittinghams there is little else to record about the designs of the types used for printing books, until about the year 1890, when William Morris set himself to design type, fired thereto by a lecture, given by Mr. Emery Walker, on the work of the Early Printers, to which he had listened. In the “Note by William Morris on his aims in founding the Kelmscott Press,” printed after his death, he writes of the purpose which led him to print books, and of the character he sought to give his letter: “I began printing books with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty, while at the same time they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye by eccentricity of form in the letters. I have always been a great admirer of the calligraphy of the Middle Ages and of the earlier printing which took its place. As to the fifteenth-century books, I had noticed that they were always beautiful by force of the mere typography, even without the added ornament with which many of them are so lavishly supplied. And it was the essence of my undertaking to produce books which it would be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing and arrangement of type.... Next as to type. By instinct rather than by conscious thinking it over, I began by getting myself a fount of Roman type. And here what I wanted was letter pure in form; severe without needless excrescences; solid without the thickening and thinning of the line, which is the essential fault of the ordinary modern type and which makes it difficult to read; and not compressed laterally, as all later type has grown to be owing to commercial exigencies. There was only one source from which to take examples of this perfected Roman type, to wit, the works of the great Venetian printers of the fifteenth century, of whom Nicholas Jenson produced the completest and most Roman characters from 1470 to 1476. This type I studied with much care, getting it photographed to a big scale, and drawing it over many times before I began designing my own letter; so that, though I think I mastered the essence of it, I did not copy it servilely; in fact, my Roman type, especially in the lower case, tends rather more to the Gothic than does Jenson's. After a while I felt I must have a Gothic as well as a Roman fount; and herein the task I set myself was to redeem the Gothic character from the charge of unreadableness which is commonly brought against it. And I felt that this charge could not be reasonably brought against the types of the first two decades of printing: that Schoeffer at Mainz, Mentelin at Strassburg, and Günther Zainer at Augsburg, avoided the spiky ends and undue compression which lay some of the later types open to the above charge.... Keeping my end steadily in view, I designed a black-letter type which I think I may claim to be as readable as a Roman one, and to say the truth I prefer it to the Roman. This type is of the size called Great Primer (the Roman type is of 'English' size); but later on I was driven by the necessities of the Chaucer (a double-columned book) to get a similar Gothic fount of Pica size.”
Pages printed in each of Morris's three founts of type are reproduced here on pages 14, 15, 17 and 19. It is interesting to compare Morris's “Golden” type—so he called his Roman fount after the “Golden Legend,” which he printed from it—with the Roman letter of the Italian printers, which he studied with so much care before he began to design his type. The “Golden” type is much heavier in face than, say, that of Jenson; and it certainly lacks the suppleness and grace of the Italian types generally. As a point of detail we may notice especially the brick-bat serifs used on Morris's capital “M” and “N,” giving a certain clumsiness to these letters. The two Gothic letter founts which Morris designed, on the other hand, must be regarded as amongst the most beautiful ever cast. William Morris's types should be judged on the setting of richly decorated borders which he designed for his pages. Adding to these the designs of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, engraved on wood by W. H. Hooper, we have in the Kelmscott “Chaucer” the most splendid book which has ever been printed.