Font Revival Source Material
Towards the end of the 1800s, a wave of American type foundries began reviving older humanistic typefaces by making them with a more modern style. In an attempt to update these fonts, metal type punch cutters would improve upon the original designs by making the fonts more consistent in size and form. After achieving slightly better legibility on the older designs the foundries would then re-release their imitations and market them as “old style”, which became an ambiguous term that let foundries steal each other’s fonts and re-release them as their own version of “old style”. By the early 1900s, ATF rereleased several typefaces in this style and just began numbering them “old style 1,2,3” etc or “old style antique 1, 2, 3” etc. Eventually one of these versions would evolve to “Bookman Old style” re-re-re-released around the beginning of the 1900s
Old Style Antique by ATF, early 1900’s
A revival of a revival of a revival.
I believe my reference for this revival is the bookman of the 1920s, a transitional serif with limited contrast, wide characters, and large almost slab serifs. Bookman has actually been revived several more times since, with a bolder display version becoming popular with phototypesetters in the 1960s and ’70s. Again lots of copies were made, added to, and altered. These versions included fancy ligatures and alternatives with big swashes. Think of a less rounded Cooper Black with french curves, classic 70’s.
1991 Microsoft System Font
A less fun version of bookman was digitized in the early ’90s and became a system font in the early days of desktop publishing. It is still widely bundled with Micro-soft office products. Unfortunately... or maybe, fortunately, the crazy swashes and ligatures were left out of early digital versions. There have been more digital versions since but none as notable as Mark Simonson’s 2011 superfamily. In what seems like a manic episode he created the most extensive family of bookman with all the bells and whistles. His revival, “Bookmania” includes 5 weights and their oblique’s as well as small caps, common case caps, old style non-lining figures, tabular and proportional figures, a hand full of swash alternatives per each letter in every weight and style. It is a truly amazing display typeface family, the only thing he is missing is a text typeface for reading. Mark’s Simonson’s massive achievement isn’t related to my font really, I but I wanted to share Bookman’s more recent history.
Bookman by Monotype, 1991
Bookmania by Mark Simonson, 2011
My revival font is based on one of the “old style” imitations from the late 1800s re-released in the 1920s. I have digitalized and renamed this reference to match the 21st century’s technologies and sensibilities. book person.
The Specialist
The source material I found was a small book called the specialist. It’s a short story about a man from rural America during the 1920s whose life work was building outhouses, what he calls a privy. A pretty funny and quick read of only 30 pages printed in 1929 using metal type. The text size looks to be about 10pt with 12pt leading. There are a few numbers and page titles in a smaller italic version of the body copy font at 8pt. I also think that the chapter titles and the cover text were set in the same font at 30, 26, and 18 point type. The challenges of working with metal type are the small inconsistencies between letters. The quality of the print is either too heavy with ink filling in joints and counters or too light not inking the entire letter. The baseline is a little uneven with letters bobbing up and down and sometimes slightly angled. Having set metal type by hand myself there are many reasons for these inconsistencies. I am guessing the quality of the metal letters was not the best and may have been overused given how popular this typeface was at the time. The paper color and texture adds a lot of visual background noise making it hard to see the letter’s stroke edge even when levels are adjusted in photoshop. It was interesting to try and keep true to the font but also make decisions about stroke weight, serif size, and shape when I would find conflicting letter references.
My reference font was slightly bolder than a normal typeface for text typesetting but it also has characteristics that helped with legibility including a taller x-height, a wider character width that opened the counters as well as fairly good rhythm and texture when spaced properly. With shorter descenders and taller ascenders, the characters became a bit easier to differentiate from one another for reading at smaller sizes. It’s not a bad reference to start with but keeping those characteristics consistent proved to be difficult for my first font. Spacing also posed a challenge for me, even after doing research into different spacing methods. It seems that spacing comes down to making a lot of optical adjustments. Although I worked with type for years my eye felt really untrained.
Software
Coming from a long career as a visual designer I knew programs like Illustrator inside and out. Because Robofont used vector points and bezier curves too I thought the transition would be seamless. Not so much, RoboFont and Illustrator may both use a “pen tool” but they work very differently. Now I have come to appreciate the massive amount of control you have while drawing in type design software compared to the limited flexibility of adobe programs.
Robofont Interface: Robofont.com
Some other challenges for me included keeping consistency with reference images and stroke contrast but mostly letter spacing, and the balance between black and white space. Eventually, after a lot of trial and error, I developed a template and quick process for finding the descender, baseline, x-height, cap height, and ascender metrics for the letters from my scanned image and exporting those images at the same height as the font metrics in robofont, while still limiting the image file weight. This process solved a lot of my inconsistency problems eliminated the need to set the x-height manually when dragging a new image into robofont every time. Another system that helped with consistency between letters was the use of components. I protested in using this helpful technique. At first, I didn’t want to learn this feature because I was already struggling a bit with the software and felt a little intimated by the idea of basically starting over so late into the process. Even if a lot of the shapes can be repeated, I had most of the alphabet done and didn’t want to waste time. But after a few days of measuring and moving points to each letter, trying to organize which letters needed to be updated. I felt the need to work smarter. Figuring out how components worked and assigning proper labeling turned out to be much easier than I assumed.
Early Versions
I went through many versions throughout the 10-week process. Because this was my first attempt at creating a typeface I was a bit indecisive with many design decisions and would often change my mind about a feature or shape and then change it back the following day. Because type design is a system, I found myself loving certain features on particular letters but disliked the same shape on another, or simply having a hard time getting that shape to look similar on both letters. I went through many, many variations on the shoulder shapes and terminals. As well as the serif size, shape and style.
Contemporary / Transitional
Book Person has some key characteristics of a contemporary serif with fairly low stroke weight, large serifs, and open apertures. I would also consider some of its other characteristics to include some features of a transitional serif, with some slightly calligraphic forms seen most in the sloping bowl of the lowercase a and the more bulbous terminals in the lowercase r and ear of the lowercase g.
Final Prototypes
The original scan of the metal type from the 1920s on the left. Digital revival on the right.
Character Set
