As the printing of advertising material began to expand in the early nineteenth century, new and notionally more attention-grabbing typefaces were needed. Poster-size types began to be developed that were not merely magnified forms of book type, but very different and bolder. Some were developments of designs of the previous fifty years, such as bold and ultra-bold types such as fat faces, which were related to Didonetypes but much bolder. Others had completely new structures: reverse-contrast letterforms, sans-serif and slab-serif were new departures at this period. Writing in 1825, the printer and social reformer Thomas Curson Hansardwrote with amusement that slab-serif and other such display types were 'the outrageous kind of face only adapted for placards, posting-bills, invitations to the wheel of Fortune...Fashion and Fancy commonly frolic from one extreme to another.'[3]
Slab-serif type was first commercially introduced by Vincent Figgins under the name "Antique", appearing in a type-specimen dated 1815 (but probably issued in 1817).[4]
Following Napoleon's Egyptian campaign and dissemination of images and descriptions via publications like Description de l'Égypte(1809) an intense cultural fascination with all things Egyptian followed. Suites of contemporary parlor furniture were produced resembling furniture found in tombs. Multicolored woodblock printed wallpaper could make a dining room in Edinburgh or Chicago feel like Luxor. While there was no relationship between Egyptian writing systems and slab serif types, either shrewd marketing or honest confusion led to slab serifs often being called Egyptians, and many early ones are named for the subject: Cairo, Karnak, and Memphis. The common metonym"Egyptian" is derived from a craze for Egyptian artifacts in Europe and North America in the early nineteenth century, which led typefounders producing Slab Serifs after Figgins' work to call their designs Egyptian.[5]However, the term Egyptian had previously been used to describe sans-serif types in England, so the term 'Antique' was used by British and American typefounders. The term Egyptian was adopted by French and German foundries, where it became Egyptienne. A lighter style of slab serif with a single width of strokes was called 'engravers face' since it resembled the monoline structure of metal engravings.
Slab serifs declined following the growing popularity of sans-serif faces, with which they always competed, and the revival of interest in old-style serif fonts as part of the Arts and Crafts movement. However, they have been regularly revived and redesigned since the nineteenth century both in modernised forms and in retro use inspired by the exuberance of Victorian design, a style of design known asVictoriana. Notable collections of original wood type are held by the Hamilton in Wisconsin and the University of Texas at Austin, collected by Rob Roy Kelly, writer of a well-known book on American poster types.[6]Adobe Systems has released a large collection of digitisations inspired by nineteenth-century wood type.
Because of the clear, bold nature of the large serifs, slab serif designs are often used for small print, for example in printing with typewriters and on newsprint paper. Joanna,Excelsior, TheSerif, FF Meta Serif andGuardian Egyptian are examples of newspaper and small print-orientated typefaces with some slab serif characteristics, often most visible in the bold weights.
The term 'slab-serif' itself is not that old: an early citation of it dates to 1954.[7]