3a. Bishop Sans - Type Specimen
Bishop Sans - Type Specimen
Posted Letter Photograph: Jon Melton
Bishop Marks Abstract:
Date Stamps on posted letters were first introduced in April of 1661 by Britain’s first Postmaster-General Henry Bishop to counteract accusations of unwarranted delays and profiteering by unscrupulous employees of the postal service belonging to The Crown. All letters in England and Wales were locally town-stamped and were sent via London, or Edinburgh in Scotland and Dublin in Ireland; ready for distribution via the ‘post roads’ throughout the provinces.
In 1673 the fourth postmaster-general Henry Bennet the 1st Earl of Arlington, introduced a new London date stamp of serif-less letterforms which proliferated for the next one hundred or so years. The forerunner of our postmark franking system, and the reason our self-adhesive labels are called ‘stamps’ – these ink-stampers appear to have been originally made from metal. But were later cut from end grain wood by craftsmen of varying ability and as such differ widely. The vast majority of date stamps, utilised a sans serif Latin Roman alphabet with I for J and V as U.
Bishop Marks as they are known mirror Roman ceramic seals, legionnaire’s signet rings and document lead bulla which guaranteed authenticity and the un-tampered arrival of correspondence and goods. This method of safe-guarding contents continued through the Byzantine period into the medieval, with lead cloth bale seals used into the nineteenth-century. Many of these are dated with the year and utilise sans serif typography to denote the producer.
Edinburgh bishop marks retained serif letterforms, and the canny scots devised an ingenious double headed month stampers so that the dates were interchangeable, thus reducing the numbers of ink stamps purchased. The double letter month abbreviations continued into the late twentieth-century using movable metal type head franking stampers for regional post collection offices.
Countless numbers of stamped letters would have been sent, and serif-less letterforms were common-place throughout the eighteenth century – yet type historians have seemingly overlooked this classically informed stamped face which likely left its mark on the the first letterpress metal types of the nineteenth century.
Type specimens are defined as typographic designs that showcase a typeface design, its context and its use. The forms within this type specimen explore the potential for a more commercial regular weight of ETRVSCA Sans that is justified by the proliferation of ‘Bishop Marks’ distributed throughout the eighteenth-century. The various original examples of linear, near mono-line, as well as flared modelling of letter strokes - provide primary sources for the production of an extended font family of ETRVSCA Sans.
The Bishop Sans Specimen was presented at the TypeThursday London (Cambridge) symposium on 09 May 2019 for critique, and was published in the book 'Ways of Seeing' by The Ruskin Press, in March 2020.
ISBN 978-1-912319-02-2
Research Question(s): How will engaging in practice-based research inform the development of a new primal sans typeface, leading to new insights into the context of the serif-less letterforms of the eighteenth-century?
Researcher's Website:
