You see, at this point in history, newspaper production rocketed to new heights, and as a result, the printing technology became a lot more efficient as well as a lot faster and rigorous. “wanted” or “reward” signs), and other, where Clarendon variants (specifically “ French Clarendon“) took on a circus look (it’s even known as “Circus Letters” in some texts).Īnyway, it wasn’t until the 1920s when Clarendon, once again, experienced a resurgence of sorts, and like before, this was primarily due to pragmatic reasons. One being the wild western in North America (i.e. It’s also interesting to note that this particular font entered pop-culture history in terms of the type of font used in in certain noted environments. But during this short time frame, the Clarendon font became very popular, and once the property hold was released, many a copycat font were produced much to the chagrin of Besley himself ( see below image, 1852). Although, from general internet perusal, the circumstances are a little vague, it would appear that Besley went on to gain further fame in later years as a Mayor of London (here is what he looked like, but if you visit the link and check out the other images, you’ll also see him immortalized in cartoon form).Īnyway, he even went on to patent the font, although this particular hold lasted for only 3 years. Apparently, until a certain point in history, this was almost always done by using italics, and Clarendon is nominally associated as the first “related” bold face – as in it was designed to look nice along with standard Times fonts.Īlthough, there were other typefaces with a similar “look” appearing at earlier dates, the Clarendon font seems to be most appropriately associated with an origin date of 1845, and by a Robert Besley of Fann St. This post, if anything, is a layman treatment of the paper.Īnyway, the Clarendon font appears to have started off as a design exercise to create a font that could highlight text within normal type.
SAMPLE OF CLARENDON FONT PDF
First up, if you want all the gory details, the pdf linked to above makes interesting reading – it’s a dissertation paper on the Clarendon font, detailing its history. O.K… so this font (which happens to be one of my favourites), has an interesting history. Note, that I know very little about the jargon and history behind such matters, but I do enjoy a good font. This, I think, is a reasonable request, and one that I’m game to explore. So, it seems that having a name like popperfont, suggests the need to discuss typeset. Wiki entry | thesis essay from Mitja Miklavcic, 2006 ( pdf)