All thin strokes and serifs were hair-thin lines. The curved strokes of the C, G, O and Q were identical. Bodoni letters looked machine-made with interchangeable parts. Caslon came from hand lettering with a quill pen. It was replaced with a new favorite designed by Giambattista Bodoni in the 1790s. Clerks and fancy painters learned to use the feather quill and then later the steel nib to create a wide variety of important documents for fire companies.įor over 60 years the Caslon typeface was used for most printing in the New World. By 1818 the Farmer's Almanac was using several type styles, especially bold fonts with contrasting hair line strokes.Ĭalligraphy was a valued skill from colonial times. It came in many sizes and fonts of regular, bold and italic. In 1733 the only typeface used by Benjamin Franklin was Caslon.
