page_title: Didone (typography)
section_title: Displacement
hierarchical_section_title: Didone (typography) / Displacement
caption_attribution_description: Page with typeface samples from the Kelmscott Press, 1897, showing samples of Chaucer, Troy, and Golden Type designed by William Morris
context_page_description: Didone is a genre of serif typeface that emerged in the late 18th century and was the standard style of general-purpose printing during the nineteenth. It is characterized by:
  Narrow and unbracketed serifs.
  Vertical orientation of weight axes.
  Strong contrast between thick and thin lines.
  Some stroke endings show ball terminals.
  An unornamented, "modern" appearance.
  The term "Didone" is a 1954 coinage, part of the Vox-ATypI classification system. It amalgamates the surnames of the famous typefounders Firmin Didot and Giambattista Bodoni, whose efforts defined the style around the beginning of the nineteenth century. The category was known in the period of its greatest popularity as modern or modern face, in contrast to "old-style" or "old-face" designs, which date to the Renaissance period.
context_section_description: Didone fonts began to decline in popularity for general use, especially in the English-speaking world, around the end of the nineteenth century. The rise of the slab serif and sans-serif genres displaced fat faces from much display use, while the revival of interest in "old-style" designs reduced its use in body text. This trend, influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement and antiquarian-minded printers such as William Morris, rejected austere, classical designs of type, ultimately in favour of gentler designs. Some of these were revivals of typefaces from between the Renaissance and the late eighteenth century such as revivals (with varying levels of faithfulness to the originals) of the work of Nicolas Jenson, William Caslon's "Caslon" typefaces and others such as Bembo and Garamond. Others such as "Old Styles" from Miller and Richard, Goudy Old Style and Imprint were new designs on the same pattern.
  An early example of the distaste some printers had for the modern type style was French printer Louis Perrin, who would eventually commission some new typeface designs on a traditional model. He wrote in 1855:
  You ask me what kind of whim leads me to revive types of the sixteen century today…I often have to reprint old poetry [from the sixteenth century] and this task invariably makes me oddly uneasy. I cannot recognise in my proofs the verses…our present day punches, which are so precise, so correct, so regularly aligned, so mathematically symmetrical…no doubt have their merits, but I should prefer to see them kept for printing reports on the railway.
  A revival of interest in the old styles of letter in Britain around 1870 was, however, criticised by master signpainter James Callingham in his contemporary textbook on the art:
  It is...marvellous to think that, after the much desiderated correction [to letters] had been applied, an attempt should recently have been made to introduce these old irregular letters again to the public notice, for the vagaries of fashion have of late brought into use in the printing trade several kinds of old-faced types...and the infection has in some degree been caught by the sign-writer...we have thus, on the one hand, a hard, an irregular and unfinished letter; and on the other, a graceful, symmetrical and highly finished letter...there is some indication that this absurdity, like all fashions that have their birth in bad taste, is happily passing away, and the modern letter is again asserting its superiority. It has always been the case in the arts that, after periods of extravaganza and bizzarerie, there has been a recurrence to sound taste. Positive retrogession is against nature and any tendency in this direction will most assuredly correct itself. The adherents of the old irregular alphabets, which were made so because scarcely anyone was capable of making them better, might just as reasonably advocate a return to the rough and unplaned machinery of the first locomotive steam engines, taking as their model the old "Puffing Billy", now so carefully preserved in the Patent Museum at South Kensington.
  One influential example in the late nineteenth century was William Morris's Kelmscott Press, which commissioned new custom fonts such as his Golden Type on medieval and early Renaissance models. Many fine press printers imitated his model, and while some printers such as Stanley Morison in the twentieth century found his work excessive, it was heavily imitated. Talbot Baines Reed in 1890, shortly before his company cast type for Morris, commented on a desire among typefounders to move back to earlier models: "types appeared leaning this way and that, flowery and stringy, skeleton and fat, round and square...until it became almost a merit that the original shape was barely recognisable. I am not describing a thing of the past. Herod is out-heroded every week in some new fancy which calls itself a letter...I do not deny that may of our modern fancy letters are graceful...nor am I bold enough to suggest that at this time of day they can be dispensed with. But I admit to some misgivings at the len
caption: Custom typefaces of the Kelmscott Press. Its medievalist approach and custom typefaces were imitated by many printers, publishers and typefounders in the late nineteenth century.
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