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Fat Faces: origins [Sebastien Morlighem]

On February 22, 2021, Sebastien Morlighem gave a great Zoom talk in a seminar series hosted by The Cooper Union in New York. In it, he described the beginnings of fat types from around 1780 until their zenith of fatness and development around 1825, all in London. Here is a summary of the exposition for those who have no access to the video at The Cooper Union.

Sebastien started with quotes from famous type experts and type historians:

• Paul Barnes, upon publishing Isambard in 2019: The fat face is the joyful expression of an idea---to make something as bold as can be---executed with real vigour and the utmost conviction. (Not really a definition)
• Talbot Baines Reed, in "Old and new fashions in typography", Journal of the Society of Arts, 1890, p. 534: The new Roman was barely established as the prevailing fashion, when a vulgar taste for fatter faces asserted itself. The demand was promptly responded to by the founders of the day, Robert Thorne leading the way. Others outstripped him in the race; and about 1820, or rather before, a face like that before you was both fashionable and popular for certain works. (A condescending view)
• Joseph Moxon, in "Mechanick Exercises Volume 2", 1683: A fat face is a broad stemmed letter.

Without a good definition, but eager to tell us the story, Sebastien showed examples of gradual thickening of the stems and increase of contrast from bold to fat, starting in Thomas Cottrell's foundry, where Robert Thorne (1754-1820) was employed. After Cottrell's death, Robert Thorne bought his foundry in 1794 and replaced the types by his own. Already in 1774, Thomas Cottrell had shown big fat letters in his A Specimen of Printing Types, very much related in shape to the Caslon types, as Cottrell had previously worked for the Caslon foundry. Similar large letters were also shown in broadsides by William Caslon in 1785. This was the time that a need arose for advertizing via posting bills and large lettering on buildings and coaches. Not to be outdone, Edmund Fry showed a very bold Ten Lines Pica in 1787 and S&C Stephenson had a sixteen lines pica in 1796. Thorne in his 1794 book, A Specimen of Printing Types, shows for the first time lower case versions of the letters. Still, serious mechanical challenges remained, as the early types of posting bills were often sand cast. Sometimes printers would use wood types, and in rare instances, even fill in the fat letters by hand.

The period from 1805 until 1810 saw the rise of the fat face; Sebastien showed us examples, in particular, of great use by the Liverpool-based printer G.F. Harris. Type historian Daniel Berkeley Updike (Printing Types: Their History, Forms and Use, Harvard University Press, 1922, vol. 2, p. 196) wrote: Thorne [...] is responsible for the vilest form of type invented up to that time. Thorne's specimen book of "Improved (!) Types" of 1803 should be looked at as a warning of what fashion can make men do. Stanley Morison, for whom Sebastien showed little respect, even wrote Thorne's "fat grotesque" [sic] was the first original English design to make an impression abroad. [...] With Thorne was produced a letter during 1800-1803 which was a novelty, distinct and dreadful. [Memorandum on Revision of the Typography of "The Times" [1930], Selected Essays on the History of Letter-forms in Manuscript and Print. Edited by David McKitterick, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980, vol. 2, p. 305]

Great progress was made in the genre by Caslon & Catherwood ca. 1810, who slowly evolved fatter types from bold typefaces. In 1812, William Caslon Juior (William Caslon IV) introduced a new production method, which he called the sanspareil matrices. They would allow for more accurate and crisper letters, and more efficient production of very large lettertypes. And so, the race was on, to make bigger and fatter typefaces. Other, newer foundries also started showing the popular fat types, including Vincent Figgins in 1815, caslon & catherwood in 1820, and Thorowgood in 1821, a year after he bought Thorne's foundry after Thorne's death in 1820. Nicolete Grey in XIXth Century Ornamented types and Title Pages [1938, London: Faber and Faber Limited] had this to add to a fat face by Fry and Steele from 1808: In this letter of Fry [...] the process seems to have reached a norm. It is a superb, wide, generous letter, magnificently roman, but with a good deal less of order and more of pomp than Trajan's classic. [...] It is a letter which falls into no category. In the process of fattening, Cottrell's ordinary eighteenth-century capital has changed, the modelling has been exaggerated and the shading become uniformly vertical and the forms of the letters have grown softer and rounder, yet it is not a modern face, for the shading is quite gradual and the bracketing very full, nor are the thick strokes thick enough, nor are the thin strokes thin enough, for it to be a fat face.

Sebastien wrote tthis all up in a booklet, Robert Thorne and the origin of the fat face (2021). The video of his talk is at Type@Cooper in the Lubalin series.

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