From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the typeface known as "Caslon". For the person, see William Caslon.

For other uses or meanings of Caslon, see Caslon (disambiguation).

Typeface	Caslon
Category	Serif
Classifications	Old style
Designer(s)	William Caslon I
Foundry	Caslon Type Foundry
Variations	Adobe Caslon Big Caslon CC LTC Caslon Founders Caslon ITC Founders Caslon Caslon 225 Caslon 471 Caslon 540
Shown here	Adobe Caslon by Carol Twombly

English roman, a Latin text face of the Caslon stable of typefaces. Restored extract from the specimen sheet below.

William Caslon's 1734 Specimen sheet, some of which is set in the Caslon typeface

Caslon is a family of serif typefaces designed by William Caslon I (1692 – 1766). His earliest design dates to 1734. Caslon is cited to be the first original typeface of English origin, but some type historians point out the close similarity of Caslon's design to the Dutch Fell types [4].

Caslon shares the irregular characteristic of Venetian ("antiqua") and Dutch Baroque types. It is characterized by short ascenders and descenders, bracketed serifs, moderately-high contrast, robust texture, and moderate modulation of stroke. The A has a concave hollow at the apex, the G is without a spur. Caslon italic has a rhythmic calligraphic stoke. Characters A, V, and W have an acute slant. In Caslon 540 and 471 the lowercase italic p, q, v, w, and z all have a suggestion of a swash.

The Caslon types were distributed throughout the British Empire, including British North America. Much of the decayed appearance of early American printing is thought to be due to oxidation caused by long expose to seawater during transport from England to the Americas. Caslon's types were immediately successful and used in many historic documents, including the U.S. Declaration of Independence. After William Caslon I’s death the use of his types diminished, but saw a revival between 1840-1880 as a part of the British Arts and Crafts movement. The Caslon design is still widely used today. For many years a common rule of thumb of printers and typesetters was to "set it in Caslon" if no font was specified.

Recent digital versions were produced by Adobe and H.W. Caslon & Company. Their "Founders Caslon" closely follows William Caslon's original design, with the addition of "ct" and "st" ligatures not found in the original.

• Carter, Rob, Day, Ben, and Phillip Meggs. Typography Design: Form and Communication. John Willey & Sons, Inc.: 1993. ISBN 0-471-28430-0
• Friedl, Friedrich, Nicolaus Ott and Bernard Stein. Typography, An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques throughout History. Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. ISBN 1-57912-023-7
• Meggs, Phillip B, McKelvey, Roy. Revival of the Fittest: Digital Versions of Classic Typefaces. RC Publications, Inc.2000. ISBN 1-883915-08-2
• [4] Nesbitt, Alexander The History and Technique of Lettering (c) 1998, Dover Publications, Inc. ISBN 0486402819 , The Dover edition is an abridged and corrected republication of the work originally published in 1950 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. under the title Lettering: The History and Technique of Lettering as Design.
• Updike, Daniel Berkeley. Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use. Dover Publications, Inc.: 1980. ISBN 0-486-23929-2

• Caslon Roman, an Unicode typeface (for Computer), developed by George Williams.
• History of typography

• Typowiki: Caslon