Caslon

The old printers' rule was "when in doubt, use Caslon", and it survived two centuries because the typeface is unobtrusive at text sizes in a way that is genuinely hard to achieve. The Dunlap broadside of the Declaration of Independence was set in it. Caslon's letters are slightly irregular by design, which is why digital versions that clean them up look worse.

The facts

Designed by

William Caslon

Released

1722

Classification

Serif

What it signals now

Eighteenth-century English printing. Legal, literary, deliberately traditional.

Where you have seen it

• The first printed Declaration of Independence
• The New Yorker's body text lineage
• Countless British book interiors

This page describes the typeface rather than showing it. Displaying a specimen requires a licensed font file and almost none of these may be redistributed, so the descriptions name the letters to look at instead.