Bookman (typeface)

Category Serif
Classification Transitional
Designer(s) Alexander Phemister
Chauncey H. Griffith
Ed Benguiat
Foundry Bruce Type Foundry
American Type Founders
Lanston Monotype
Design based on Old Style Antique

Bookman or Bookman Old Style is a serif typeface derived from Old Style Antique and designed by Alexander Phemister in 1858 for Miller and Richard foundry.[1] Several American foundries copied the design, including the Bruce Type Foundry, and issued it under various names. In 1901, Bruce refitted their design, made a few other improvements, and rechristened it Bartlett Oldstyle. When Bruce was taken over by American Type Founders shortly thereafter, they changed the name to Bookman Oldstyle.

Bookman was designed as an alternative to Caslon, with straighter serifs, making it more suitable for book and display applications. It maintains its legibility at small sizes, and can be used successfully for headlines and in advertising. In 1936, Chauncey H. Griffith of the American Linotype foundry developed a revival.

ITC Bookman

ITC Bookman is a revival designed by Ed Benguiat in 1975, for the International Typeface Corporation. Benguiat developed a full family of four weights plus complementary cursive designs. Benguiat also drew a suite of swash and alternate characters for each of the members of the family. This version adds a large x-height and moderate stroke contrast to improve legibility.

Fonts for swash and alternate characters were eventually released in OpenType versions of the fonts,[2] or separately as ITC Bookman Swash.

ITC Bookman Light, Light Italic, Demi, Demi Italic became part of Adobe PostScript 3 Font Set.

It is also called 'Revival 711' by Bitstream, and 'BM' by Itek.

URW++ donated their version, known as URW Bookman L, to the Ghostscript project as a free software replacement for the ITC version. It was further enhanced by the Polish GUST foundry as part of their TeX Gyre project and named Bonum. [3]

Monotype version

Monotype Bookman Old Style, marketed as Bookman Old Style, was designed by Ong Chong Wah. It is based on earlier Lanston Monotype and ATF models. The italic was redrawn following the style of the Old style Antique italics of Miller and Richard, but also incorporates the italic features from ITC Bookman. Though the face's title includes the word 'Old Style,' the near vertical stress of the face places it more in the transitional classification. This version include support of Cyrillic, Greek, extended Latin characters.

It was bundled with Microsoft Office products since version 4.3, except in Windows 7 Starter, and in TrueType Font Pack. Retail version of the font was released in 2005 via Linotype.

Jukebox Bookman

It is a revival of the original Bookman family by Alexander C. Phemister and Chauncey H. Griffith, designed by Jason Walcott and published by Veer.

This family includes 6 fonts, with complementary italic, and 2 swash designs for each of the roman and italic fonts.

Bookmania (2011)

It is a revival of Bookman Oldstyle and the Bookmans of the 1960s, designed by Mark Simonson of Mark Simonson Studio. The design was started from a custom font designed by Mark Simonson back in 2006, which was based on Bookman Bold Italic with Swash, and a Bookman Bold with Swash font designed by Miller & Richard (as credited by Letraset). The italic fonts were redesigned to include optical correction.

This family includes 10 fonts in 5 weights, with complementary italic. OpenType features include small caps, 680 swash characters, 35 optional (discretionary) ligatures, lining and old style figures (both proportional and tabular), full f-ligature set, alternate characters, automatic fractions, automatic ordinals, 6 stylistic sets (Cursive Forms, Roman/Italic Alternates, Commoncase Caps, Jenson 'e', Traditional Old Style Figure One, Wavy Crossbars).

References

  1. ↑ Neil Macmillan (2006). An A-Z of type designers. Yale University Press. p. 146. ISBN 0-300-11151-7. Retrieved 2009-08-21.
  2. ↑ What's Hot From ITC: January 2006
  3. ↑ http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry/tex-gyre/

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Bookman.