The Fonts Used at
Test Family Genealogy and History

	Text of the Frame of Goverment

I am interested in John Test, his family and the events surrounding their lives. The history--the events of the period shaped them, shaped those around them and created the nation we live in today. Much of what we can learn can be found in documents that were created at the time our ancestors lived. These documents convey information at several levels. One of those levels involves the methods used by the printers who made them -- the typography of the era. But there is more to it than that.

William Bradford was the first printer in the middle colonies -- those colonies between New England and the Virginia. Bradford came to Philadelphia in 1682 and printed Penn's Frame of Government. In 1685 he published the first almanac printed in America outside of Massachusetts (Grolier Club Catalog of Books Printed by William Bradford New York: 1893, p. 7).

It is almost certain that John Test would have known him and read his publications. Moreover, Bradford was a key participant in a conflict with William Penn and other Quaker leaders. John Test would have known about this conflict and may have been a supporter of Bradford in it. Bradford was charged with treasonous sedition. In defending himself he argued for basic freedoms of the press.

In the end, Bradford decided that a printer could not work in the oppressive political climate created by the Quakers. He could not print even the most trivial news without first clearing it with Penn's advisors. He moved to New York and created the New York Gazette – the first newspaper printed in the city. Later, he would advise a young Benjamin Franklin looking for a job at his printing shop that his son Andrew Bradford, a Philadelphia printer, was in need of a new ambitious and capable printer.

See The History of Printing in America

The printers themselves are interesting and when put in the historical context, they become even more interesting. Bradford most probably used the Fell font you are reading in this very sentence. It is nearly impossible to identify the source of the type he actually used. He may have bought type from the Dutch. It is more likely that he bought his type faces in London. Bradford printed William Penn’s Frame of Government most likely using the Fell types you see here. The use of Blackletter type in the line Province of Pennsylvania well illustrates that printers used a variety of fonts, sizes, and other variants.

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The 22 year-old Benjamin Franklin at his Printing Press
The Early American Library

A 17th Century Font by John Fell

IM Fell English Pro

ABCDEF GHIJKL MNOPQR STUVWXYZ
abcdefgh ijklmnopq rstuvwxyz
0123456789

Fell Pica Italics

ABCDEFGHIJKLMN
OPQRSTUVWXYZ

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

0123456789

The Quaker Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog.

Fell English Italics

ABCDEFGHIJKLMN
OPQRSTUVWXYZ

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

0123456789

The Quaker Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog.

The Fell Types

Stanley Morison/Harry Carter:
Oxford at the Clarendon Press

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, there were said to be more Dutch types in England than in Holland. Dutch types weren't merely prized for their visual or metallurgical qualities, they filled a vacuum in the marketplace: a Star Chamber decree of the previous century had placed such oppressive restrictions on domestic typefounding as to virtually forbid its practice in England.

Although these prohibitions were lifted by royal decree in 1637, their effects were felt well into the next century. One of the first to recognize England's overwhelming reliance on foreign sources was Bishop John Fell, who was charged in 1667 with accumulating a comprehensive set of types for the Oxford University Press. Rather than continuing to import Dutch types, Fell chose to import a Dutch typefounder, Peter de Walpergen, who cut for the press a collection of fonts included in the assortment known today as “The Fell Types.” Among these was a handsome and practical set of book types cut before 1693, in the “great primer” size (roughly 14pt), which are revived here. These faces were among the first ‘Old Styles’ cast in England, and as such are an essential link between the seventeenth century Dutch Old Styles of Kis, Van Dijck and Voskens, and the eighteenth century English Old Styles of William Caslon.

Catalogue of Books Printed
by William Bradford

Source: The Fell Types
John Fell and the Oxford University Press
Also see: The Fell Revivial

Igino Marini, the designer of the digital Fell fonts used here, provides the following passage from Harry Carter's book on the Fell types:

Technical imperfection is undoubtedly part of the character of ‘Fell’ in print. The pieces of type differ in height to an extent that horrifies a type-founder and tries the patience of a machine manager; their faces are not horizontal, many are not struck at the correct angle with the vertical. By employing modern techniques it would be possible to put these things right, but so far nobody dares propose it; too much of the evident difference between Fell and other types would be lost.

Harry Carter,The Fell Types – What has been done in and about them (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).

Ohio State Historical Society Library
The Fell types; what has been done in and about them [by] Harry Carter.
Author: Carter, Harry Graham.
Imprint: New York, Oxford University Press, 1968.
OCLC Number: ocm00452292
PA Box 336 27 -

John Fell's sister, Mary Fell, married Thomas Willis -- an important researcher in neurology and psychiatry. See Carl Zimmer's book Soul Made Flesh. Willis was one of John Fell's mentors.

Carl Zimmer's mom is Marfy Goodspeed, the author of the informative website focusing on Hunterdon history and genealogy and the colonial history of New Jersey. I recommend it.

The Fell types used here are provided by Igino Marini.
Igino Marini: the history of Fell types
The Fell fonts include the famous Fell flowers used here as horizontal rules

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Test Family Genealogy and History

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789

This is another Fell font -- Great Primer Small Capitals. I use it in the title. Notice that it's all capital letters.

Alec Julien writes:

Small caps are uppercase glyphs drawn at a lowercase scale. A common misconception –unfortunately reinforced by most word processing programs as well as by CSS on the web– is that a small cap is just a regular capital letter scaled uniformly down to a smaller size. In actuality, a proper small cap is a carefully crafted glyph that differs in significant ways from a uniformly–scaled-down capital letter.

Source: http://ilovetypography.com/2008/02/20/small-caps/

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Devroye

Devroye is a modern font designed by Luc Devroye a mathematician who teaches at McGill University in the Mathematics and Computer Science departments. His fonts were originally designed to meet the typographical needs of mathematicians and the needs of everyone for easy to read type. It is a cleaner but stylish font without the nicks and scratches of the Fell font. With the serifs it contrasts well with the other fonts used in this project.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789

This font has character -- the simple serifs on the capitals and the flowing serifs on the lower case fonts are stylish and imaginative. The M and N spread out. The lower case letters are curvacious.

I use it in menus and whenever I want a small section of text to stand out from the rest of the body.

The Devroye font was designed by a super imaginative bunch of font designers at apostrophiclabs at apostrophiclab.pedroreina.net/


HHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Caslon

Surviving 270 years of typographic trends, technology changes and font fads, Caslon has earned its title of the oldest living typeface. Faces like Garamond or Jenson predate Caslon, but all that is available today are replications of these early designs. Caslon is a different story. The original punches, hand-cut by William Caslon, are still intact and could be used to produce new matrices and fonts that are identical to those used to set type in the early 18th century.

Not only is Caslon old, it also has staying power. Caslon has been the typeface of choice among printers and typographers for most of its history. It has been used to set nearly every form of printed material: from fine books, to high-pressure advertising, to the most mundane ephemera. Caslon has even been the choice of celebrities. It was the favorite typeface of Benjamin Franklin and was used to set both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. George Bernhard Shaw, the famous British author and playwright, also insisted that all his work be typeset in Caslon.

Caslon SSi at 2.0em

I began using this version of Caslon by Southern Software Inc. starting about 2012. Southern Software had a cloudy past going out of business in the early 1990s. Apparently, no one bought the rights to it and so its fonts are considered as open source. It is a readable Caslon and since the more professionally executed Caslons are expensive and, in the case of ITC, not legally available for use on the web, I am left with the SSI fonts. I use it for texts that deal with more recent events.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMN
OPQRSTUVWXYZ

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

0123456789

The Quaker Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog.

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Caslon SSi Italic at 2.0em

ABCDEFGHIJKLMN
OPQRSTUVWXYZ

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

0123456789

The Quaker Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog.

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CASLON   SSI   SWASH ITALIC AT 2.0EM

Obviously this is meant for using as the Leading letter of a word.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMN
OPQRSTUVWXYZ

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

0123456789

TEST FAMILY GENEALOGY AND HISTORY

The Quaker Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog.

Test Family Genealogy And History

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Caslon SSi Alternate Glyphs - Ligatures

street

Fell French Canon Italics

Fell French Canon Italics

ABCDEFGHIJKLMN
OPQRSTUVWXYZ

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

0123456789

The Quaker Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog.

Fell French Canon Regular

ABCDEFGHIJKLMN
OPQRSTUVWXYZ

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

0123456789

The Quaker Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog.

Source: http://www.fonts.com/findfonts/recentreleases/2005/01-02-2005.htm

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Fonts on the Web

‘@font-face’ allows authors to specify online fonts to display text on their web pages. By allowing authors to provide their own fonts, ‘@font-face’ eliminates the need to depend on the limited number of fonts users have installed on their computers.

A brief history of web fonts

This is not a new idea. In 1998, CSS2 described a way to link to fonts from style sheets, and both Microsoft and Netscape added support for web fonts in their browsers. However, neither vendor supported the most widely used font format, TrueType. Instead, they each picked a different, little-used format with few tools to support it (EOT and TrueDoc, respectively). This resulted in fonts disappearing from the designer’s toolbox.

Now they're back. Firefox 3.5 introduced in November of 2009, makes possible the use of standard TrueType fonts on webpages. Combine this with Internet Explorer's use of OpenType Fonts and new methods of converting file formats and we have a full–range of fonts to use just by uploading them to a server and calling them whenever we want to use them.