The Fann Street Foundry was a

type foundry A type foundry is a company that designs or distributes typefaces. Before digital typography, type foundries manufactured and sold metal and wood typefaces for hand typesetting, and matrices for line-casting machines like the Linotype and Mono ...

(a company that designs or distributes

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are list of type ...

s) that was located on

Fann Street Fann Street is a street in the City of London. It runs west–east, from its junction with Aldersgate Street and Goswell Road in the west, to the junction with Golden Lane in the east. In its original form of Fann's Alley the street was almost ...

City of London The City of London is a city, ceremonial county and local government district that contains the historic centre and constitutes, alongside Canary Wharf, the primary central business district (CBD) of London. It constituted most of London fr ...

Establishment

In 1794, Robert Thorne (1754-1820) acquired the type foundry of the late Thomas Cottrell based in Nevil's Court, and moved it to 11 Barbican, and then in 1802 to a former brewery in Fann Street, and renamed it the Fann Street Foundry. On his death in 1820, the business was bought by

William Thorowgood William Thorowgood (died 1877) was a British typographer and type founder. On the death of its founder Robert Thorne in 1820, Thorowgood bought the Fann Street Foundry. He was active in the development of Sans Serif In typography and letter ...

with the help of money he had won in a lottery. Thorowgood was the first to use the term "

Grotesque Since at least the 18th century (in French and German as well as English), grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, mysterious, magnificent, fantastic, hideous, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus ...

" to describe a

Sans-Serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than seri ...

typeface and the first to design one in lower case with his ''Seven Line Grotesque''.

Nineteenth-century heyday

In 1838, the typographer

Robert Besley Robert Besley (1794–1876) was an English typographer, creator of Clarendon (typeface) in 1845 and the Lord Mayor of London in 1869. Career Besley was taken into partnership by William Thorowgood at the Fann Street Foundry in Fann Street, City o ...

was taken into partnership by William Thorowgood at the Fann Street Foundry. He created Clarendon in 1845, the first typeface to be registered under the Ornamental Designs Act of 1842, and retired from the business in 1861, becoming Lord Mayor of London in 1869. In 1842, Charles Reed co-founded the firm of Tyler & Reed, printers and typefounders. He became a partner in the Fann Street Foundry in 1861 (which thereafter became known as Reed & Fox). The Fann Street business formed the basis for his own typefounding business, Sir Charles Reed & Sons, which had an office at 33 Aldersgate Street. In 1881, following his father's death, the author and typefounder,

Talbot Baines Reed Talbot Baines Reed (3 April 1852 – 28 November 1893) was an English writer of young adult fiction, boys' fiction who established a genre of school story, school stories that endured into the mid-20th century. Among his best-known work is ' ...

became head of the Fann Street Foundry. By then he had begun his monumental ''History of the Old English Letter Foundries'', published in 1887, which was hailed as the standard work on the subject. Talbot Baines Reed died in 1893, aged only 41.

Gallery

Throwgood 1825 fat face type.jpg, Fat face type in an 1825 specimen book. Thorowgood 1825 Slab Type Specimen (7609775334).jpg,

Slab serif In typography, a slab serif (also called ''mechanistic'', ''square serif'', ''antique'' or ''Egyptian'') typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular ( Rockwell), ...

capitals Thorowgood Streamer Specimen (7501757228).jpg, Reversed or "streamer" slab serif capitals Throrowgood Big Slab (7128712995).jpg, Slab serif lower-case Fann Street Foundry Clarendon image with text for emphasis.jpg, The first Clarendon type, in a c. 1874 specimen

Closure

Fann Street Foundry closed in 1906, after which its designs passed to the Sheffield-based

Stephenson Blake Stephenson Blake is an engineering company based in Sheffield, England. The company was active from the early 19th century as a type founder, remaining until the 1990s as the last active type foundry in Britain, since when it has diversified in ...

. Founded in 1818, Stephenson Blake was the last active type foundry in the UK at the time of its closure in 2005.Stephenson, Blake
''British Letterpress''. Retrieved 17 July 2014.

Establishment

Nineteenth-century heyday

Gallery

Closure

References

Further reading