National Trust is a

humanist Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential and agency of human beings. It considers human beings the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry. The meaning of the term "human ...

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 s ...

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 thousands o ...

National Trust The National Trust, formally the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, is a charity and membership organisation for heritage conservation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In Scotland, there is a separate and ...

of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It is a corporate font family and not available for licensing. Grotto motto, Stourhead park (9313913818)

National Trust is based on an inscription dated around 1748 on the

Stourhead Stourhead () is a 1,072-hectare (2,650-acre) estate at the source of the River Stour in the southwest of the English county of Wiltshire, extending into Somerset. The estate is about northwest of the town of Mere and includes a Grade I liste ...

estate, part-owned by the National Trust since 1946. The inscription on which the font is based is an

epigram An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, and sometimes surprising or satirical statement. The word is derived from the Greek "inscription" from "to write on, to inscribe", and the literary device has been employed for over two mill ...

, ''The Nymph of the Spring,'' in the

grotto A grotto is a natural or artificial cave used by humans in both modern times and antiquity, and historically or prehistorically. Naturally occurring grottoes are often small caves near water that are usually flooded or often flooded at high t ...

beside the lake where a statue of a

nymph A nymph ( grc, νύμφη, nýmphē, el, script=Latn, nímfi, label=Modern Greek; , ) in ancient Greek folklore is a minor female nature deity. Different from Greek goddesses, nymphs are generally regarded as personifications of nature, are ...

sleeps, and is in a mostly

style, one of the first such uses of the style since classical antiquity. The unusual style of the inscription came to the attention of historians, most famously

James Mosley James Mosley (born 1935) is a retired librarian and historian whose work has specialised in the history of printing and letter design. The main part of Mosley's career has been 42 years as Librarian of the St Bride Printing Library in London, whe ...

, whose work ''The Nymph and the Grot'' on early sans-serif lettering is named after it. Mosley has concluded that he cannot be certain of the source of the style and that it does not seem to have influenced successors, but that its unusual, simplified structure may be an "exercise in rusticity" related to the spirit of the construction, intended to imitate a natural cave. As the inscription was destroyed by mistake in 1967, it had to be replicated from Mosley's photographs. Being based on the Stourhead inscription makes National Trust a "stressed" or "modulated" sans-serif, with a clear difference between horizontal and vertical stroke widths. Other typefaces in this style include Optima (inspired by medieval inscriptions from

Florence Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilancio demografico ...

), Britannic and

Radiant Radiant may refer to: Computers, software, and video games * Radiant (software), a content management system * GtkRadiant, a level editor created by id Software for their games * Radiant AI, a technology developed by Bethesda Softworks for '' ...

. The four line poem, translated into English from Latin by

Alexander Pope Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 O.S. – 30 May 1744) was an English poet, translator, and satirist of the Enlightenment era who is considered one of the most prominent English poets of the early 18th century. An exponent of Augustan literature, ...

, was attributed to an inscription on a legendary Roman fountain with a statue of a sleeping nymph above the

River Danube The Danube ( ; ) is a river that was once a long-standing frontier of the Roman Empire and today connects 10 European countries, running through their territories or being a border. Originating in Germany, the Danube flows southeast for , pa ...

. The motif of a sleeping nymph besides a fountain was popular with

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ide ...

humanists and influential among neoclassical garden designers, but is now generally suspected to be a fifteenth-century forgery. In English, it runs:

Nymph of the Grot, these sacred springs I keep
And to the murmur of these waters sleep
Ah spare my slumbers, gently tread the cave
And drink in silence, or in silence lave.

References

{{notelist, 30em

External links

Fonts In Use

Touching The Past
video of a talk by Paul Barnes discussing the design in 2013 Humanist sans-serif typefaces Corporate typefaces National Trust Typefaces designed by Paul Barnes Typefaces and fonts introduced in 2009 Typefaces with optical sizes