Bookman (typeface)

[2][3][4] Old Style Antique has letterforms similar to those of the eighteenth-century typeface Caslon, with a more even and regular structure, a wide and tall lower-case, and little contrast in line width.

Bookman is much bolder than the original Old Style, to which it was intended to be a bold complement, almost to the point of being a slab serif, and evolved its own identity, with American Type Founders giving it its own name and a distinctive set of swash characters, with which it is often associated.

Often described as "modernised old style", it is a redesign of "true old-style" serif faces from the eighteenth century such as Caslon.

(During the period many fonts once created were copied by other foundries, in some cases probably illegally by electrotyping, making the evolution of styles complicated to track.)

[24] Theodore De Vinne wrote of the style in 1902 that it was "in marked favour as a text letter for books intended to have more of legibility.

[26][3] Printers of the period noted the confusion of the apparently tautologous name,[5] one saying that it reminded him of a joke about a man who ordered café au lait with milk.

[5] Bookman was popular in twentieth-century American printing for its solid colour, wide characters and legibility: one 1946 review commented that it "can stand a lot of mauling".

[29] Fine printers and those more interested in the pre-nineteenth century typefaces from which it descended, however, were less impressed by it, finding it dull for its wide, large lower-case and lack of elegance.

[30][3] It was most popular in the USA: by the mid-twentieth century, all the Modernised Old Styles had become almost totally eclipsed in British printing except as a backup choice, partly as a result of the dominance of the British Monotype Corporation's extremely successful and well-promoted series of book faces and Linotype's similar series.

[32][33] In 1950 Monotype's marketing manager Beatrice Warde told an audience of Canadian printers that Bookman had not "been used in England in 20 years.

I had Sixties Bookman on rub-down type sheets when I was in high school in the early Seventies discovering type.One of the most famous results of this period is the 1975 ITC's revival from which many modern versions are descended.

Type designer and lawyer Matthew Butterick has written that as a result of its use in this period Bookman "evokes the Ford administration.

Benguiat developed a full family of four weights plus complementary cursive designs: unlike previous Bookman versions, these are true italics in which the letters take on handwriting forms.

[46] Other companies developed similar knockoff fonts matching ITC Bookman's metrics for PostScript compatibility.

URW++ donated their PostScript alternative, known as URW Bookman L, to the Ghostscript project as a free software replacement for the ITC version.

Veer(Corbis) closed permanently in early 2016 but the Jukebox Bookman fonts continue to be offered online through other digital type vendors.

Unlike the ITC and Monotype revivals, Simonson chose to use the obliques preferred by ATF, offering true italic characters as an alternate.

A promotional image for Miller & Richard's "Old Style" . As the text says, the design was intended to capitalise on a fashion of interest in eighteenth-century "old style" designs, while offering a more delicate and regular structure reflecting how typecutting had evolved towards the Didone style since then. Bookman evolved from bolder versions of this design. [ b ]
Miller and Richard's Oldstyle Antique. The design is bolder but on the same basic structure. It was presumably not designed by Phemister, who had emigrated to New York in 1861 before moving to Massachusetts a few years later. [ c ]
An Old Style Antique in a Roycroft Press edition of 'Sonnets from the Portuguese' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1898. The Roycroft Press used the family extensively. Alexander Lawson describes this as being intended by founder Elbert Hubbard to copy the dark style of impression favoured by William Morris ' Kelmscott Press. [ 3 ] It was used by at least one printer around the time period for the same reason. [ 26 ] Ward also suggests that "its heavy, almost equally weighted lines seemed to go well with the heavy lines of arts and crafts woodcuts." [ 27 ]
A specimen of Linotype Bookman
Old Style Antique in a Roycroft edition of Robert Browning
Meola's Bookman, showing its extremely large range of ostentatious swash characters
Monotype Bookman (inner lines) compared to samples of the original ATF Bookman (the top one from a larger point size) scaled to the same cap height. It can be seen that the modern Bookman revival has generally wider characters than the original, a somewhat higher x-height (taller lower-case letters) and several detail differences. Ovink describes the rounded 'a' as being based on the Oldstyle Antique prepared by a Philadelphia foundry, and the straight-topped 'a' as that prepared by Miller & Richard. Visible also is a compressed descender on the 'g' to allow tighter linespacing.
Comparison between Monotype Bookman (above in the samples) and its ancestor Caslon (below), scaled to matching cap height. The caps are quite similar but the lower-case letters of this Bookman revival are wider and higher (a higher x-height ).
Revivals of Bookman Old Style with swashes were often seen in 1970s graphic design, often quite tightly spaced.