P22 Curwen Poster and Maxima

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P22 Curwen Poster Type

The Curwen Press was founded by the Reverend John Curwen in 1863 as a publisher of sheet music. Harold Curwen, John's grandson, took over the press in 1914 and became a key figure in British printing, producing some of the most distinctive books and ephemera of the early twentieth century.

While inspired by Arts and Crafts ideals, Harold Curwen embraced technology and modern printing techniques. He took pride in printing and design work, describing himself as “a rebel against commercial ugliness.” Aside from running the day-to-day business of the press, he involved himself actively in presswork and design, including type design. Curwen created his own sans-serif typeface in 1911 and, along with H.K. Wolfenden, the Curwen poster type in 1918. This sturdy bracketed serif roman type design was made in ten sizes, ranging from 4.5 line to 22 line, for exclusive use by the Curwen Press.

Curwen Press closed in 1984 and as with many shuttered print shops, the contents have found their way to various new homes. The original drawings for the poster type are included in the The Curwen Press Papers collection at Cambridge University Library. In 2009, the Barbarian Press acquired the impressive collection of ornaments and standing borders from the Curwen printshop. The poster type itself came into the possession of the Robertson Davies Library of Massey College at the University of Toronto. Eight sizes of this type are now part of the extensive wood type collection at Massey.

For several years in the early 2000s, there was an active participation between P22 Type Foundry and the Type Club of Toronto. Starting in 2002 as co-organizers of TypeCon in Toronto, and following up as sponsors of several Type Club of Toronto events, Richard Kegler was able to do some research at the Robertson Davies Library of Massey College at the University of Toronto. Upon seeing the Curwen Poster Types and realizing these may be the only examples of this type in existence, it felt like this was a perfect candidate for becoming a new P22 font.

The specimen of Curwen Poster, showing six sizes of the lowercase g, illustrates how various sizes were cut with subtle and sometimes not so subtle differences giving unique character to each size. The P22 digitization was based on the 6-line font.

P22 staff designer Colin Kahn was given free-reign to design a companion for the Curwen Poster type. As the name implies, Kahn's Curwen Maxima takes a maximalist approach that is on one hand an italic (with lowercase treatments of the e, f, p, etc. that are classic italic) but also the addition of shadows and tendrils that contradict the Arts and Crafts staidness of the Roman.

Kegler recalls "Colin was a very talented young man and I liked to give him free rein to see what he would come up with. It was not what I expected but he had a vision and I wanted to encourage that and let him go. It might not have been the most economically driven decision."

Released in 2005, the Curwen set includes the very straightforward Curwen Poster and the Curwen Maxima companion both created by Colin Kahn.

The specimen, showing six sizes of the lowercase g, illustrates how various sizes were cut with subtle and sometimes not so subtle differences giving unique character to each size. In 2005 a digital version was made, based on the 6-line font, for general release by P22 Type Foundry.