By Tamye Riggs

Major changes to the face of typography came with the Industrial Revolution. For more than three centuries, typography and printing had been firmly tied to book publishing and its refined aesthetics. In the early 1800s, the printing industry veered off in a new direction. New print media appealing to the masses—newspapers, magazines, and all forms of advertising—were emerging as a dominant force, calling for a new style of type design compatible with mass production and consumer tastes. Print journalism necessitated types that were both readable and boldly eye-catching. Slab Serifs, also known as Egyptian typefaces, quickly became the flavor of the day.

A more evolved form of Egyptian was Clarendon, designed by Robert Besley for London’s Fann Street Foundry in 1845. It was intended as a bold display companion to text faces for commercial printing. This design, named for the Clarendon Press in Oxford, had the strong presence of the typical Egyptian, but was more refined, with greater contrast between thick and thin strokes and its trademark bracketed serifs. Its instant success spurred multiple foundries to issue their own variants, and an entire sub-classification of Slab Serifs was named after the typeface. Clarendon’s popularity continued, and Edouard Hoffmann and Hermann Eidenbenz at Haas revived the typeface in 1953. A variety of Clarendons have been issued since then, with added weights and styles making this design suitable for both text and display applications.

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