Stephenson, Blake

The type foundry of Stephenson, Blake and Co (situated in Sheffield) supplied many superb typefaces over the years, some even migrating to the digital age of the PC – like Impact (which was launched in 1965). I am interested in the styles termed ‘grotesque’ which were launched from the tail end of the nineteenth century. The style is sans serif, and it is also known as ‘Gothic’ in some quarters. But here I will stick to ‘grotesque’. They had been introduced in the early 19th century, and the term ‘grotesque’ was probably earned at the time, probably because it had no serifs, and was therefore considered rather ugly, or in bad taste.

The grotesques were characterised by this lack of serif, and a lack of decoration, yet it is a solid, sincere font which communicates its message in a direct manner. The majority of these fonts would have been used for advertising, harnessing that truthfulness and fresh-faced clarity of diction. But as tastes changed in the twentieth century, Grotesques were seen to represent the new, the revolutionary, and the democratic. For example, Stephenson, Blake Grotesque No 9 of 1907 was chosen by Wyndham Lewis for the Vorticist Manifesto, in BLAST. It was also used for the thick bold wood type of the cover. Lewis returned to using Grotesque No. 9 for other projects too, for example titling in his novel The Apes of God.

The early pre-First World War Grotesques – by Monotype and Stephenson, Blake (amongst many others), became very popular in the 1920’s and 1930’s. They represent the first move towards a cleaner, simpler non serif, and were used for inspiration by the new generation post-war font designers like Eric Gill, Renner and Pierpoint. The Gill faces were a remove from Grotesque, with its consistent stroke width, but Pierpoint stuck with variable stroke and produced the Monotype 215. The PC font ‘Arial’ is directly descended from 215, as Monotype provided it.

The following is a summary of when the first ‘classic’ Grotesques appeared from Stephenson, Blake: