History of medial decoration?

Craig Eliason

I'm curious about the appearance of bumps or other decorations halfway up the stems of type. David Shields calls them medial or midstem decorations and notes them in the context of wood types in the Tuscan style. They are exploited in a good number of chromatic wood types. Other features of Tuscan style like bifurcated serifs can be traced many centuries back in writing, but I wonder what precedents there are (in writing, type, or other lettering) for the medial decorations. 

Here's a Figgins specimen from the 1st half of the 19c showing medial ornament independent of "Tuscan" style:

Are there earlier types like this? Do earlier "writing masters" show experiments like this? 

(My point of departure are embroidered letters, so I do know about those, which easily predate wood type and Figgins.)

Dan Reynolds

I am not sure of their age by Fournier’s time but he showed a few ornamented faces with a similar feature on page 88 in the second volume of his Manuel typographique (1766).

Craig Eliason

Oh yeah! Thank you!

Kent Lew

I believe J.F. & Matthias Rosart were cutting similarly ornamented types around the same time period, 1760s. I can try to find examples to snapshot later.

John Hudson

Rosart was my first thought too, but there are only more fully floriated examples in the small specimen. Maybe there is something closer to this style in the Harry Carter’s Enschedé book?

Miles Newlyn

In lettering the midstem ornament certainly goes back to the twelfth century, probably earlier.



The above are fifteenth and sixteenth century, photo taken from Nicolette Gray's A History of Lettering.

michele casanova

@Miles Newlyn Is it possible that it is also connected to the Lombard capitals "with pearls"?

Miles Newlyn

@michele casanova I think you're right.

Kent Lew

Here are some Rosart examples from Typefoundries in the Netherlands from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century by Charles Enschedé [Haarlem, 1978]. Floriated and with medial decorations. Slightly later date than the Fournier specimen.

The captions don’t specify, but I believe all are ascribed to Jacques-François. I think Matthias may have later copied or recut some of his father’s types, but is mostly known for decorative ornaments, I believe.

John Hudson

The last of Kent’s examples occurs in the 1768 Rosart specimen too, but I had perhaps unfairly discounted it from this discussion since there is so much more going on in the design than just the medial ornament. Rosart’s ornamented types are labeled in the specimen ‘fleuragé’, which I think is a lovely term.

Scott-Martin Kosofsky

An interesting Tuscan with medial decoration was made in the 1780s by Jean-Gabriel Bery, a French stencil maker. A set of Bery stencils (some 4000 of them) was purchased in France by no less than Benjamin Franklin and it survives today at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. Fred Smeijers and Eric Kindel made a set of fonts based on them. It’s interesting how the decorated Tuscan became a stencil design without any degree of self-consciousness.