[3] Forming a sprawling series, they include several unusual details, such as an 'r' with a droop, a bruised-looking 'G' and 'C' with inward curls on the right, very short descenders and considerable variation in stroke width, creating a somewhat eccentric, irregular impression.

[4][5][6] Much less even in colour than later families like Univers and Helvetica, they were very commonly used in British commercial printing in the metal type era, with a revival of interest as part of a resurgence of use of such "industrial" sans-serifs around the 1950s.

[7][8][9] Writing in The Typography of Press Advertisement (1956), printer Kenneth Day commented that the family "has a personality sometimes lacking in the condensed forms of the contemporary sans cuttings of the last thirty years.

They had bullied and paid Stephenson Blake, the typefounders, to recall Grot no 9 from historic retirement as they had perceived it as the most economical and powerful letter to exploit the wartime restriction on advertising space.

[27] In the United States Roger Black, a prominent publication designer, discovered it in 1972 from a Visual Graphics Corporation phototypesetting catalogue, and came to like it.