Romulus (Series 520) — Quarter strength jobbing

Romulus was designed by the Dutch typographer and calligrapher Jan van Krimpen (1802-1957) a few years after he had become friendly with the Monotype Corporation's typographical adviser, Stanley Morison. VanKrimpen was a keen reader of all that Morison wrote, especially in his essay 'Towards an Ideal Italic' published in The Fleuron vol. 5 (Cambridge, 1926). It argued that the only function of a secondary (italic) type was to support the body letter (roman). This it could only do if it possessed sufficient differential indications; but since harmony between the two forms could only be obtained by conservation of similarity, differentia in the secondary type were to be kept to a minimum. Morison concluded that the only good solution was 'a sloped type, sufficiently inclined to be differentiated from the primary type, yet following its design as closely as possible'. The secondary letter was therefore obliged to agree in all essentials of design with the text type. The perfect italic was to be a sloped roman. And this was precisely what Van Krimpen provided for Romulus.

To draw a slanted roman was a fairly simple matter for Van Krimpen. The difficulties arose in cutting the type: several roman letters developed awkward overhangs when slanted at an italic angle, thereby causing trouble in making them fit together easily. But the greatest difficulty arose in the eye of the reader. In a review of Romulus in Signature no. 13 (London, I940), an observant scholar of printing types, A. F. Johnson, commented that sloped roman 'may be logical but results in a stiff and monotonous letter'. Morison later told Harry Carter that the objection to sloped roman proved to be that the average reader did not notice that it was sloped. He admitted that his italic for Times New Roman 'owed more to Didot than to dogma'. Despite the defects of the novel experiment made with the secondary type, Romulus roman has great elegance in its larger sizes, and Jan van Krimpen demonstrated in several books of his own design that the smaller sizes of Romulus create an extremely readable and attractive text page when suitably leaded between the lines. Before the types were made for mechanical composition, the original drawings were followed by P. H. Radisch when he cut trial founts for the Enschedé typefoundry in Haarlem.