Typography Tuesday
The Foulis Brothers and Alexander Wilson
The Scottish brothers Robert and Andrew Foulis established their book selling and publishing business in Glasgow in 1741. At first they had to farm out most of their titles to other printers, but by 1742 they acquired their own press, and the following year they became the official printers for the University of Glasgow. They became so famous for the beauty and clarity of their over 550 editions that they were referred to as "the Elzevirs of Britain."
The beauty came from the Foulis’ owns skills and aesthetic choices as printers, but the clarity can be attributed to the bold evenness of their typefaces, designed and produced by the accomplished Scottish type designer and punch cutter (among other things) Alexander Wilson, who had established his foundry business in 1742. Wilson’s designs are distinct from those of his contemporary, John Baskerville, and would later be grouped with a class of typefaces known as Scotch Roman. In 1743, the Foulis Brothers produced the first Greek book printed in Glasgow using Wilson’s design, which would attain renown for its later use in the Foulis’ 1756-1758 edition of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.
Wilson’s early typefaces (bottom images; a 1750 edition of More’s Utopia, and a 1759 edition of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura) appear to owe their designs to Dutch models, while his Double Pica, first used in 1768 for the Foulis’ quarto edition of Gray’s Poems clearly shows Baskerville’s influence (top two images). In this latter volume, the Foulis Brothers print an appreciation, in third person, for Wilson’s design:
This is the first work in the Roman character which they [the printers] have printed with so large a type; and they are obliged to Doctor Wilson for preparing so expeditiously, and with so much attention, characters of so beautiful a form.
Today, Wilson’s designs live on in modern revisions, such as David Quay’s and Freda Sack’s Foundry Wilson (below) originally designed in 1993 as a commission for the International Typeface Corporation (ITC); Foulis Greek, part of the Junicode family of fonts designed by Peter S. Baker; and Wilson Greek designed in 1995 by the incomparable Matthew Carter.
Foundry Wilson designed by David Quay and Freda Sack, based on a typeface first produced by Alexander Wilson in 1760.
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