Centaur (series 252) — Quarter strength jobbing

Bruce Rogers, recognising the success of Monotype Garamond and Poliphilus, offered his own design, Centaur (hand-cut in 1915 for hand-setting), to the Monotype Corporation so that it could be made available for machine composition. Centaur was modelled on the type of Nicolas Jenson's edition of Euse-bius De evangelica pracparatione, 1470. Rogers's redrawn version for Monotype Centaur was issued in 1929 and used in the Oxford Lectern Bible, which Rogers designed and the production of which he personally supervised - in Morison's opinion, 'the most monumental impression ever given to a Monotype face'. (The type was in fact redrawn for this book and the 22-point Centaur was recut on an 18-point body so that the type could be machine-set.)

Jenson worked before italic appeared in print; and Rogers in 1915 did not design a companion italic for Centaur. For Monotype Centaur, however, Morison's experiments (at Rogers's suggestion) began with a modified version of Arrighi, the hand-cut 14/20 italic first used in 1925 to print Robert Bridges' poem The Tapestry.