Back to the previous post: Why a type art piece and why now?
This election ripped some nasty scabs off a lot of gaping wounds. Journalists and artists got trolled mercilessly and shamefully. It became OK to talk about--well, you know. It's been pored over by everyone--and really, there's no one who hasn't groveled. Where are your scruples, Niki Haley?
But it goes back way before this, way back. This election has been in the making for 50, maybe 150 years. That's where it all began, and that's the reason why Clarendon is in the picture.
In the 1830's, a bunch of currents were sweeping the US, floating over from northern Europe, notably Britain. The Second Great Awakening. As ominous as the words sound, they were well-meaning. What they festered into was evident three weeks ago.
Around the 1830's the first winds of abolition started to pick up. They had been evident at the time of the Revolutionary War, but lay dormant as the US slapped together the Bill of Rights, the laws of Congress and the Star Spangled Banner. We settled into a country sharply divided by attitudes of City folks and Country folks, yet, as one of the most literate countries in the world at the time, we were in a position to make up our minds about a lot of things simply because we could read about them.
Tooling around the LOC website for 19th century graphics, I found the poster above, condemning the sale and keeping of slave in the District of Columbia. It was published in 1836 by the American Anti-Slavery Society, based in New York.
The Anti-Slavery poster, seems to be one of the early presentations of a Clarendon-style typeface: notice the bracket serif and the cross bar on the capital E, which differs from the Egyptian bold face regarded as Clarendon's predecessor.
This election ripped some nasty scabs off a lot of gaping wounds. Journalists and artists got trolled mercilessly and shamefully. It became OK to talk about--well, you know. It's been pored over by everyone--and really, there's no one who hasn't groveled. Where are your scruples, Niki Haley?But it goes back way before this, way back. This election has been in the making for 50, maybe 150 years. That's where it all began, and that's the reason why Clarendon is in the picture.
In the 1830's, a bunch of currents were sweeping the US, floating over from northern Europe, notably Britain. The Second Great Awakening. As ominous as the words sound, they were well-meaning. What they festered into was evident three weeks ago.
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| Left and detail above: A theatre poster from 1872. Note the thick but rounded bracketed serif, a modification from the original British Clarendon. |
Tooling around the LOC website for 19th century graphics, I found the poster above, condemning the sale and keeping of slave in the District of Columbia. It was published in 1836 by the American Anti-Slavery Society, based in New York.
The Anti-Slavery poster, seems to be one of the early presentations of a Clarendon-style typeface: notice the bracket serif and the cross bar on the capital E, which differs from the Egyptian bold face regarded as Clarendon's predecessor.
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