Cloister is a serif typeface that was designed by Morris Fuller Benton and published by American Type Founders from around 1913.

[3] American Type Founders presented it as an attractive but highly usable serif typeface, suitable both for body text and display use.

[5] 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 [has] perceived 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.

This meant that it was cast with the area of the typeface above the baseline smaller than normal, so the descenders could be at a long, historically accurate length.

[9][10][b] Later Cloister was released on hot metal typesetting machines such as that of Linotype, Intertype and Monotype, and additional weights were created for these.