Looking for a Caslon Font

John Savard

I had picked up several fonts from Google Fonts. But despite Libre Caslon being from Impallari Fonts, I had passed it by. So I decided to remedy that.

On first glance, though, I wasn't happy with it. The lowercase o did not render well, and the typeface looked more like a generic roman face than a Caslon. I may just not have looked at it carefully enough, so this shouldn't be considered criticism.

Anyways, though, I did a search for other Caslon fonts. And I found one on a free fonts site. But it was by someone by the name of George Williams. Although I downloaded it, I thought that I wouldn't be able to use it; it must be a pirated copy of Williams Caslon, even if the site claimed it was licensed under the SIL Open Font License.

Doing some more searching, though, I was reminded that William Berkson was the designer of Williams Caslon - and that Font Bureau got gobbled up by Monotype, but they left Williams Caslon with Type Network.

And that George Williams was the author of another open-source free font-related thing... FontForge!

Small world.

EDIT: Later, I found another result; someone was commenting that although he had a font for the typeface "Big Caslon" installed on his computer, it wasn't showing up in Word. This was on a Microsoft support site. The response claimed that this font came with Microsoft Word, but wasn't installed by default. Also, a site was given where it could be downloaded from.

While that link didn't work, the font was elsewhere on the site pointed to. However, it didn't belong there; the font was by Matthew Carter, sold through Carter and Cone, and was not a free font. That there are pirated fonts out there is not news, but I'm surprised Microsoft is pointing people to them. Of course, Microsoft did license several fonts to include with Windows, so, for all I know, they might have licensed Big Caslon for Microsoft Word.

I also encountered Caslon OS. This was from Hanken Design. They have several free fonts on their site, but Caslon OS isn't one of them. But it isn't one of the paid fonts on their site either. So I have no idea what its status is.

Florian Hardwig

I’m not sure what your question is (if you have one).

Caslon by George Williams has nothing to do with Williams Caslon. The former is indeed licensed under the SIL Open Font License. I don’t have anything good to say about its quality.

Caslon OS by Hanken Design Co is available under the SIL Open Font License, too. It says so in the font’s meta data.

Font Bureau gave the rights to Williams Caslon back to its designer, William Berkson, who continued the distribution deal with Type Network.

John Savard

Thank you for the information. My post was basically a comment on the confusing situation on trying to find free fonts that aren't pirated if you go outside of Google Fonts - or other known good projects, like GUST or the Greek Font Society. And on how many 'Caslon' typefaces don't look a lot like Caslon.

Kent Lew

Also, Apple licensed a single style of Big Caslon for distribution with MacOS. But I don’t believe it is installed by default and may need to be downloaded/activated through the system app Font Book.

Chris Lozos

@Kent, I purchased Big Caslon decades ago on a floppy disk ;-)