Back in June, there was a long, interesting discussion here about different metal versions of Caslon’s oldstyle types. At the time, I uploaded an image of the version shown in the H.W. Caslon and Co. Ltd. specimen of 1924, offering Caslon old face roman & italic, cast entirely from matrices produced from the original punches engraved in the early part of the eighteenth century in Chiswell Street, London, by William Caslon. One can’t get much more of a precise description of the alleged provenance of the types shown, but I pointed out that compared to William Caslon’s own specimen sheets — and those of his grandson, which I have on my wall — it was clear that the 1924 types had been refitted, with both the horizontal spacing and vertical alignment much improved. Because of the claims of the 1924 specimen about the provenance of the matrices (‘produced from the original punches engraved in the early part of the eighteenth century’ etc.), I thought that only the fit had been adjusted, presuming that other differences were due to the relatively heavy inking of the 1924 specimen.
A few days ago I came across this paragraph in James Mosley’s essay ‘Reviving the classics: Matthew Carter and the interpretation of historical models’ in the very good catalogue of the recent exhibition of Matthew’s work:
When type was cast in metal, the revival of an old type was sometimes merely a matter of dusting down the old copper matrices and putting them back into use. But when in the 1880s the Caslon foundry in London wanted to promote the wider sales of the ‘original’ Caslon types that they had been casting for some decades for a few select clients, they found that some of the old materials were awkward to cast from. Many of the sizes of the Caslon Old Face were therefore recut in steel by expert punchutters, who unobtrusively reduced some of the stranger irregularities of the design. The foundry never publicly admitted what it had done to the type, which it continued to market as ‘original’, and the recutting was so skillfully accomplished that clients happily continued to accept the product in the mistaken belief that the Caslon type with its eccentricities was an authentic casting from the 18th-century matrices.
