Here are a few san serif typefaces, with a focus on Curwen type from The Curwen Press Miscellany, edited by Curwen Press typographer Oliver Simon (1895-1956) and published in London for the Curwen Press by the venerable Jewish publishing house Soncino Press in a limited edition of 275 copies in 1931.
San serif types made their first appearance in England in the early 19th century when William Caslon IV cast the first san serif type for the Latin alphabet. But san serif types really came of age in the 20th century, first with Edward Johnston's typeface for the London Underground (1916). Eric Gill designed Gill Sans ten years later in 1926 and Rudolf Koch created Kabel (displayed here as Cable) in 1927. Harold Curwen, a student of Johnston and Gill, designed the Curwen Sans alphabet in 1912, which was revised and cut as type in 1928 exclusively for the Curwen Press. A lowercase was added for the 24pt size and cast in 1931.
Our copy The Curwen Press Miscellany is a gift from the estate of our late friend Dennis Bayuzick (1946-2022).
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Been playing a bit of marathon, and the graphic designer part of my brain cant help but feel fascinated by the mixing of serif and san serif fonts throughout the game
The great British designer and calligrapher Edward Johnston is principally remembered for two things: almost single-handedly reviving calligraphy as an art form in the 20th century and designing the famous sans-serif Johnston typeface that was used throughout the London Underground system from 1916 until it was redesigned in the 1980s by Banks & Miles.
Frank Pick, the Commercial Manager of London Underground Railway, commissioned a “block letter” alphabet from Edward Johnston in 1916. It is thought to be the first modern sans serif typeface, preceding the Erbar-Grotesk of Jakob Erbar (1922), Paul Renner’s Futura (1927), Rudolf Koch’s Kabel (1927), and Eric Gill’s Gill Sans (1928). Johnston’s distinctive font was actively used by London Transport (LT) for half a century, but began to fall into disuse by the 1970s until its revival in modified form for digital reproduction in the 1980s.
In designing the font, Johnston did not follow centuries-old typographical conventions. The design was originally intended for use in lithographic tracing sheets, and only became metal and wood typefaces in the 1920s. The design’s unconventionality created some spacing challenges when transformed into solid type. Colin Banks, the co-founder with John Miles of Banks & Miles in 1958 which conducted the digital redesign, writes:
Johnston was curiously unaware or willfully indifferent to those five hundred years of typographical experience. The main principle of his block letter was that the thickness of strokes in the letterforms should be absolutely consistent throughout each fount and that is the way he drew them. . . . [He] was determined on his dogma of keeping all stroke thicknesses precisely the same, irrespective of whether they were horizontal, vertical or changing from one to the other, or of how dense or constricted were the shapes that these strokes encompassed. . . . [making for] some very uncomfortable letters. . . .
Johnston realized this problem only later, and as the London Transport’s special sans lettering became predominately used in wood, Johnston applied himself to the problem, producing a table of spaces for LT’s printers to follow.
The specimens shown here were letterpress printed in 1995 by the Libanus Press using Johnston’s Sans wood type from the London Transport Museum on Aquarelle Arches paper, and inserted into Colin Banks’s article “Edward Johnston and Letter Spacing” in Matrix 15 (1995), published in England by John and Rosalind Randle’s Whittington Press. Our copies of Matrix are donations from our friend and benefactor Jerry Buff.
