. As the text says, the design was intended to capitalise on a fashion of interest in eighteenth-century "old style" designs, while offering a more delicate and regular structure reflecting how typecutting had evolved towards the
Didone style since then. Bookman evolved from bolder versions of this design. The ancestor of Bookman 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. 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. Ward also suggests that "its heavy, almost equally weighted lines seemed to go well with the heavy lines of arts and crafts woodcuts." These designs, for
MacKellar, Smiths, & Jordan Co. in Philadelphia and Miller & Richard in Edinburgh were then copied and extended by a series of American type foundries, according to Ovink in a mixture of sizes based on the two foundries' 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 MacKellar, Smiths, & Jordan 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. 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. Fine printers and those more interested in the pre-nineteenth century typefaces from which it descended, however, were less impressed by it, finding it dull for its wide, large lower-case and lack of elegance. While
John Betjeman liked the design for its association with
hymn-books, and used it in several of his books to evoke this atmosphere, the slightly younger
Philip Larkin described its use in a review of Betjeman's autobiography
Summoned By Bells in terms suggesting that he found its use archaic and somewhat ridiculous. In 1950 Monotype's marketing manager
Beatrice Warde told an audience of Canadian printers that Bookman had not "been used in England in 20 years." One 1959 British study of typefaces – albeit one connected to Monotype and carried out by the controversial
Cyril Burt, later accused of fabricating research – described Monotype's Oldstyle Antique as "seldom used for ordinary book work" and treated it as a design most appropriate for books for children under 12.
Chauncey H. Griffith of the
Mergenthaler Linotype Company developed a revival for Linotype's
hot metal typesetting system (which was named "Bookman"), and
Monotype also offered one. (Linotype's has been digitised by Bitstream based on its design from this period form, making it one of the few digital versions not based on post-war versions.) Other Old Style Antique releases were common in American printing during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ==Phototypesetting period==