Old Style or Modernised Old Style was the name given to a series of serif typefaces cut from the mid-nineteenth century and sold by the type foundryMiller & Richard, of Edinburgh in Scotland, as well as many derivatives and copies. The exact date of Old Style's release is apparently uncertain as Miller & Richard published specimens erratically, but according to James Mosley and Morris it first appears in an 1860 specimen. The Old Style faces of Miller & Richard, reportedly cut by punchcutter Alexander Phemister, were made in imitation of earlier styles of typeface, particularly the Caslon typeface cut by William Caslon from the 1720s, but with a moderniseddesign. It was extremely successful: the 1880s Bibliography of Printing describes its popularity as "unsurpassed in the annals of type-founding".
Design
Like Caslon, Old Style has slanting top serifs and an avoidance of abrupt transitions of weight, but compared to Caslon it is much lighter in colour and the stress is vertical, reflecting changes in taste since the eighteenth century. The letters are rather wide and the italic is evenly, and rather strongly slanted. The two-way Q recalls the Baskerville type of the mid-eighteenth century. The name "old style" is confusing, as it and "old face" have been used differently by different authors to refer to "true old-style" printing types from around 1480–1750 and the new "Old Style" face of Miller & Richard and its imitations, which appear rather different. Walter Tracy and others have used the term "modernised old style" to describe the Miller & Richard designs to reduce ambiguity, although "Old Style" was the name under which Miller and Richard sold it as. It is sometimes classified as a "transitional" serif typeface due to these modernisations. The typeface Bookman Old Style is a descendant of a bolder version of the Old Style face, known in the nineteenth century as Old Style Antique.
Gallery
History
Released at a time when Caslon type was coming back into fashion, Old Style became a standard typeface sold by many foundries. It was also copied by the new hot metal typesetting companies Monotype and Linotype. Monotype's copy was their second best-selling typeface of all time in hot metal. Besides simple copies, it 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. Legros and Grant parodied the large number of copies of Old Style in their 1916 textbook on printing technology, Typographical Printing Surfaces, by printing a poem with different lines in different copies. Reviews of the aesthetic quality of Old Style have often been low since the end of the nineteenth century, despite its precise and careful design, and it declined in popularity during the twentieth century. While recognising its practicality in his book A Tally of Types, Stanley Morison described it in 1935 as "a sort of diluted version of Caslon", William Morris's biographer William S. Peterson as "a pallid imitation of Caslon" and Mosley as "bland". It generally went out of fashion in body text in favour of new designs such as Times New Roman or more authentic revivals such as Baskerville and Bembo by the mid-twentieth century in Britain, although Hugh Williamson in 1956 noted that it was still popular for niche uses due to an extensive character support accumulated over the years of its popularity. More positive reviewscome from Nesbitt, who describes it as "a light face, but well-designed throughout" and Macmillan, who describes Phemister's engraving technique as "of the highest quality". Several digitisations are available, often of later hot metal adaptations.
