Times Roman™

Stanley Morison, Typographic Advisor to The Times of London, spent five weeks at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp shortly before undertaking the design of a new text typeface for the newspaper. There he must have seen van den Keere’s Canon blackletter sharing capitals with his Gras Canon roman on the opening pages of the Folio Specimen of 1580. This at once explains Morison’s theories concerning the influence of Flemish blackletter on the color and x-height of seventeenth century Dutch romans, and illuminates some of the pecularities in form of The Times’ new roman. More…

The design was dictated by Morison and drawn by Victor Lardent, a draftsman in the advertising department at The Times. The Times contracted with The Monotype Corporation and Linotype & Machinery, Ltd. for manufacture of the matrices necessary to publish the paper, and after one year of exclusive use, permitted them to release the typeface for general use from October 1933.

Mergenthaler Linotype introduced the face fourteen years later, using the L&M design. The boldface is a Modern design, barely related to the roman, intended for use as a newspaper boldface. Sonoran Serif is Monotype Times New Roman as distributed at low digital resolutions by IBM. Both Linotype and Monotype claim trademark rights in spite of its origin at The Times.