Traditions & vernacular · 1810–1900 · Western Europe, North America
Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type
Also known as Jobbing printing, Wood type poster, Playbill style, Artistic printing
The commercial jobbing print of the industrial century: posters, playbills, auction notices and ephemera built from a flood of new display types (fat faces, Egyptians, grotesques, Tuscans and condensed wood type). Lines are centred and each is set in a different face and size to fill the measure, framed in rules and stock borders and printed in black with one or two flat colours.
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01
How it works
- Centre every line and change typeface and size line by line, enlarging the key words to fill the full measure.
- Combine condensed and extended wood type, slab serifs, fat faces and Tuscans; contrast of weight and width is the hierarchy.
- Frame the sheet with printers' rules, corner ornaments and stock borders.
- Add a stock engraving and print in black with one or two flat colours, often on tinted paper.
- Write for the street: capitals, exclamations and pointing hands that demand immediate attention.
London type foundries; American wood-type makers in New York and Wisconsin
02
Its design choices
From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.
- Layout & composition
- Space & hierarchy
- Typography
- Colour
- Surface & texture
- Ornament
- Medium & production
- Tone & intent
- Avoids
- Dynamic asymmetry, Modular grid, Flush left, ragged right, Lowercase only, Generous white space, Ornament-free
Palette
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Typefaces
Fat face romans
Thorne, Figgins
Egyptian / Antique slab serifs
Clarendon
Fann Street Foundry, 1845
French Clarendon (reversed-stress Italienne) wood type
Tuscan and other ornamented wood type
Gothic condensed (grotesque) wood type
Known for
Robert Thorne and Vincent Figgins
fat faces and Antique slab, 1810s
William Caslon IV, Two Lines English Egyptian
first sans-serif type, 1816
Darius Wells
first American wood type, 1828
William H. Page & Co. and Hamilton Manufacturing Co.
wood type
Hatch Show Print, Nashville
1879–
Rob Roy Kelly, American Wood Type 1828–1900
1969
03
Make something in this style
Say what you need, and Stylogeny’s image studio draws it from Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type’s design choices and checks it against them. It takes about a minute, and you get a link to share.
04
Where it comes from, and what it’s close to
Before it
The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.
After it
The styles that grew out of it.
Alike in its design choices
Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.
05
Real works
Artefacts in museums, libraries and archives that show the style, linked at their source.
- The Hippotheatron and New York Cirque: Grand Equestrian, Gymnastic and Acrobatic PerformancesTorrey Brothers, Printers, New York · c. 1869 · Library Company of Philadelphia (via Wikimedia Commons)
- Recruits Wanted! 104th Pennsylvania Regiment! (Ringgold Regiment recruiting broadside)Printed at the "Democrat" office, Doylestown, Pa., by W. W. H. Davis · c. 1862 · Library Company of Philadelphia (via Wikimedia Commons)
- Playbill: Mr. Risley and His Son, Classical Gymnastics; Gwynneth Vaughan (New Strand Theatre)Designer unidentified (London jobbing printer) · 26 June 1843 · Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University (TCS 63)
06
Sources
- Rob Roy Kelly, American Wood Type 1828–1900 (1969)
- Nicolete Gray, Nineteenth Century Ornamented Typefaces (1938; rev. 1976)
- James Mosley, The Nymph and the Grot: The Revival of the Sanserif Letter (1999)
- Philip B. Meggs & Alston W. Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design
- Wikipedia: Fat face (Didone-derived display type, London c. 1805–1810): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_face
How Stylogeny researches and checks a style: where the facts come from.