page_title: Bookman (typeface)
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Bookman (typeface) / History
caption_attribution_description: English: United States, 1898 Books Leather, paper and ink 11 3/8 x 9 1/16 x 7/16 in. (28.89 x 23.02 x 1.11 cm) Gift of Max Palevsky and Jodie Evans (M.91.375.82) Decorative Arts and Design
context_page_description: Bookman or Bookman Old Style, is a serif typeface. A wide, legible design that is slightly bolder than most body text faces, Bookman has been used for both display typography and for printing at small sizes such as in trade printing, and less commonly for body text. In advertising use it is particularly associated with the graphic design of the 1960s and 1970s, when revivals of it were very popular.
  Bookman evolved from fonts known as Old Style Antique, which are bold derivatives of the "Modernised Old Style" design created by Alexander Phemister around the 1850s for the Miller & Richard foundry. These have letterforms similar to those of the eighteenth-century typeface Caslon, with a more even and regular structure, a wide and tall lower-case, and little contrast in line width. Bookman is much bolder than the original Modernised Old Style, to which it was intended to be a bold complement, almost to the point of being a slab serif. The 1924 textbook Introduction to Advertising describes Bookman as "simple, masculine and leaves the impression of reliability without heaviness".
context_section_description: The ancestor of Bookman Old Style is Miller & Richard's "Old Style", cut by Alexander Phemister. Often described as "modernised old style", it is a redesign of "true old-style" serif faces from the eighteenth century such as Caslon. Like them, it has sloping top serifs and an avoidance of abrupt contrasts in stroke widths. The lower-case letters are quite wide and the x-height (height of lower-case letters) is quite large. Widely resold and pirated, it became a standard typeface and helped to create a genre of a wide range of loose revivals and adaptations of the Caslon design, visible in the wide-spreading arms of the T and the sharp half-arrow serifs on many letters. (Ronaldson Old Style by Alexander Kay (1884) was another, as was Phemister's own later Franklin, created after he had emigrated.)
  The direct ancestor of Bookmans were several fonts from around 1869 named "Old Style Antique" intended as a bold complement to the original Old Style face. "Antique" was a common name given to bolder typefaces of the time, now often called slab serifs, and identifies the aim of creating a complementary bolder design on the oldstyle model for uses such as emphasis and headings. However, the old style antique fonts also became used for extended body text use. Although Old Style Antique faces were bolder than Old Style, the difference was not great enough that they could not be used for body text.
  G. Willem Ovink, a historian of type, writes in his history of the style in 1971 that:
  A bold Old Style was needed. This was indeed produced, almost simultaneously in Philadelphia and in Edinburgh [around 1869] in two distinct designs, both under the name of Old Style Antique. The term 'Antique' probably refers less to historical forms than to the boldness and the stubby serifs of the Egyptians [slab serifs], which were also called antiques. In the 1890s, when such faces as Caslon and Jenson had introduced the notion that all historic romans were bold, their colour and old-style basic forms made the old-style Antiques in the words of De Vinne...'now often used as fair substitutes for older styles of text types,' regardless of their unhistoric origin. The course of development is difficult to trace."
  These designs were then copied and bought up by a series of American type foundries, according to Ovink in a mixture of sizes based on the Philadelphia and Edinburgh designs. (During the period many fonts once created were copied by other foundries, in some cases probably illegally by electrotyping, making the evolution of styles complicated to track.) Ovink describes the "Philadelphia" Oldstyle Antique as being different for being slightly less bold and having an 'a' with a rounded top and a 'T' with slight curves on top. Theodore De Vinne wrote of the style in 1902 that it was "in marked favour as a text letter for books intended to have more of legibility." As Ovink notes, Old Style Antique was used by historically minded printers to emulate the solid style of fifteenth-century typefaces, and in particular to emulate the custom Golden Type used by William Morris at his Kelmscott Press. Printers of the period noted the confusion of the apparently tautologous name, one saying that it reminded him of a joke about a man who ordered café au lait with milk.
  By 1903 Old Style Antique was sold by American Type Founders under the new name of Bookman Old Style, with an added 'italic'. ATF did not offer a normal italic, instead featuring an oblique, or "sloped roman", in which the letters are simply slanted. Serif typefaces which use an oblique are now quite rare, but the style was relatively common for display typefaces in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was sold with some swash capitals and other letters. Although one critic described its swash letters in 1913 as "ridiculous", they would become a popular feature of revivals and derivatives.
  Bookman was popular in twentieth-century American printing for its solid colour, wide characters and legibility: one 1946 review commented that it "can stand a lot of mauling". Fine printers and 
caption: An Old Style Antique in a Roycroft Press edition of 'Sonnets from the Portuguese' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1898. The Roycroft Press used the family extensively. Alexander Lawson describes this as being intended by founder Elbert Hubbard to copy the dark style of impression favoured by William Morris' Kelmscott Press.[3] It was used by at least one printer around the time period for the same reason.[26] Ward also suggests that "its heavy, almost equally weighted lines seemed to go well with the heavy lines of arts and crafts woodcuts."[27]
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