[2][3] The Bell typeface has a precise appearance that features stylish contrasts between thick and thin strokes and ball terminals on many letters; it was influenced by the radical Didone styles of type becoming popular on the continent, in particular the work of the Didot family.

[a] The figures have a number of elaborate details reminiscent of the steely calligraphy of the period, and the slight inclination of some of them led Walter Tracy to suggest that Austin was following a written example.

Its history was studied by the historian Stanley Morison in the late 1920s and early 1930s, whose employer, the Monotype Corporation, created a 1931 revival, particularly popular for printing on high-quality paper.

Morison praised Austin for his "exceptional technical gift" and described his Bell typeface as "surpassing all previous English and continental type-cutting in precision [and maintaining] independence equally against Bodoni and Baskerville".

[1] Historian James Mosley has also written in that in this period "the use of wove paper, hot-pressed [and] the cult of a simpler, more open page made the appearance of the type itself a more prominent feature of an edition, and one to which its promoters tended increasingly to draw attention.

[1] The initial success of the face was short lived however, both due to business problems with the British Letter Foundry, which led first to Bell leaving it and then its sale in 1797, and later by 1808 a dramatic change in tastes in printing towards darker typefaces with greater extremes of thick and thin strokes.

[15] From the early nineteenth century onwards, the Bell typeface remained in the collection of various companies and finally Stephenson Blake, generally overlooked and little used.