Cloister is a

serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ...

typeface that was designed by

Morris Fuller Benton Morris Fuller Benton (November 30, 1872 – June 30, 1948) was an American typeface designer who headed the design department of the American Type Founders (ATF), for which he was the chief type designer from 1900 to 1937. Many of Benton's ...

and published by

American Type Founders American Type Founders (ATF) Co. was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85% of all type manufactured in the United States. De Vinne, Theodore Low, ''The Practice of Typography,'' Century Comp ...

from around 1913. It is loosely based on the printing of

Nicolas Jenson Nicholas Jenson (c. 1420 – 1480) was a French engraver, pioneer, printer and type designer who carried out most of his work in Venice, Italy. Jenson acted as Master of the French Royal Mint at Tours and is credited with being the creator of on ...

Venice Venice ( ; it, Venezia ; vec, Venesia or ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 ...

in the 1470s, in what is now called the "old style" of serif fonts. American Type Founders presented it as an attractive but highly usable serif typeface, suitable both for body text and display use.

Metal type release

To ensure its versatility, Cloister was released in a wide selection of sizes and weights. This included an italic (ATF's design, as italics did not exist in Jenson's time) with

swash capitals A swash is a typography, typographical flourish, such as an exaggerated serif, terminal, tail, entry stroke, etc., on a glyph. The use of swash characters dates back to at least the 16th century, as they can be seen in Ludovico Vicentino degli A ...

, an inline style and Cloister Initials, a set of initial capitals by

Frederic Goudy Frederic William Goudy (, March 8, 1865 – May 11, 1947) was an American printer, artist and type designer whose typefaces include Copperplate Gothic, Goudy Old Style and Kennerley. He was one of the most prolific of American type designers and ...

to match. The practice of creating a wide range of variants of a successful face was a standard ATF practice in order to capitalise on a successful typeface's popularity and allow coherent layout and graphic design; its 1923 specimen book described its approach of creating families which could allow types to "talk at command with varying emphasis and orchestral power...the client asperceived that a catalogue or advertisement set in one type family had more influence...than if its message to the public were confused by a medley of display types." Unlike many other American Type Founders typefaces, Cloister was cast on the "art line" rather than the standardised "common line" of American metal type used in the period. This meant that it was cast with the area of the typeface above the baseline smaller than normal, so the

descenders ''Descenders'' is a cycling video game developed by Dutch studio RageSquid and published by No More Robots. It was released for Linux, macOS, Windows, and Xbox One on 7 May 2019, for PlayStation 4 on 25 August 2020, for Nintendo Switch on 6 No ...

could be at a long, historically accurate length. ATF released a

blackletter Blackletter (sometimes black letter), also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for the Danish, Norweg ...

design under the name of "Cloister Black"; this and a set of Cloister Borders were the first ATF typefaces to use the name, before Cloister Old Style was released. Later Cloister was released on

hot metal typesetting In printing and typography, hot metal typesetting (also called mechanical typesetting, hot lead typesetting, hot metal, and hot type) is a technology for typesetting text in letterpress printing. This method injects molten type metal into a mol ...

machines such as that of Linotype, Intertype and Monotype, and additional weights were created for these. Cloister was somewhat variably named by printers in the metal type period, with "Cloister Old Style", "Cloister Oldstyle", "Cloister Old Face" and "Cloister Oldface" all used to refer to it. Cloister's release in metal type included the following: * Cloister Old Style roman * Cloister Italic * Cloister Cursive (swash alternates for the italic) * Cloister Bold * Cloister Bold Italic * Cloister Title (titling capitals, talking up the whole surface area of the metal type with no space for descenders) * Cloister Bold Title * Cloister Bold Condensed * Cloister Lightface (a lighter style) * Cloister Lightface Italic * Cloister Cursive Handtooled

Digitisations

A digitisation has been released by P22 and another by

URW URW may refer to: *Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield *Union of Russian Workers *UnReal World, survival video game *Unrestricted Warfare, military strategy *Urawa Station is a junction passenger railway station located in Urawa-ku, Saitama, Japan, operat ...

. Goudy's Cloister Initials, much esteemed in their own right, have also been digitised by P22 and by Dieter Steffmann. Cloister Black has also been digitised separately.

References

{{notelist, 30em

External links

ATF's 1923 specimen book
(their legendary last major specimen before the Depression), showing Cloister on pp. 66–81 (original page numbers).
Specimen sheet
(Intertype specimen)
ATF 1912 specimen book
- shows Cloister Black (pages 810-811) and Cloister Borders (page 1038) Letterpress typefaces Old style serif typefaces Typefaces designed by Morris Fuller Benton American Type Founders typefaces

Metal type release

Digitisations

See also

References

External links