Vincent Figgins

Vincent Figgins (1766-1844), of Peckham, England, was a British type-founder. After an apprenticeship with Joseph Jackson, he established his own type foundry in 1792. His company was extremely successful and, with its range of modern serif faces and display typefaces, helped to define the styles of British printing in the nineteenth century.

Figgins started his career as an apprentice to the typefounder Joseph Jackson from 1782 until Jackson's death in 1792, before setting up his own business. According to Talbot Baines Reed, who knew his grandson, Figgins was largely the manager of the foundry from about 1790 onwards due to Jackson's poor health. He married Elizabeth and had the sons Vincent (d. 1860) and James, later an alderman and MP, Henry and four daughters.

On Jackson's death, Figgins apparently could not afford to take the foundry over; it was instead purchased by William Caslon III, seeking to set up a foundry independent of his family's. A close friend of Jackson's, the printer, author and antiquarian John Nichols, encouraged Figgins to open his own foundry. Nichols had witnessed Figgins’ work and talent many times. Figgins would many years later write to Nichols to thank him for his generosity during the beginning of his career:

"I am greatly obliged to you for the very flattering mention of my name, but you have not done yourself the justice to record your own kindness to me: that, on Mr. Jackson's death, finding I had not the means to purchase the foundry, you encouraged me to make a beginning. You gave me large orders and assisted me with the means of executing them; and during a long and difficult struggle in pecuniary matters for fifteen years, you, my dear Sir, never refused me your assistance, without which I must have given it up. Do mention this—that, as the first Mr. Bowyer was the means of establishing Mr. Caslon—his son, Mr. Jackson—it may be known that Vincent Figgins owes his prosperity to Mr. Bowyer's successor.”

Figgins' foundry was established at White Swan Yard, Holborn, moving in 1801 to West Street, Smithfield. His first important commission was to make a facsimile type for Macklin's Bible. Bensley, the printer of the Macklin’s Bible (the type for which was originally cut by Jackson) had decided to renew the type and have it correspond with the original. Instead of going to Caslon, who had Jackson's matrices, he asked Figgins. Figgins was able to make a perfect recreation of the type. He then worked on a similar job to finish the Double Pica type in Robert Bowyer’s edition ofDavid Hume's The History of England. This was being worked on by Jackson at the time of his death.

Figgins' company issued several specimens starting from a brief sheet in 1792 (although they were apparently not always accurately dated: watermarks indicated that Figgins continued to use a dated title page for some years), with his sons issuing a specimen soon after his death in 1845. Berthold Wolpe published a reprint of his 1801 and 1815 specimens.

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of Figgins’ career was its beginning, in which one of his tasks was to finish a Greek font begun by Jackson for Oxford University Press that was to be cut into metal by a punchcutter, an engraver practitioner of a highly specialised trade. His son in 1855 claimed that his father’s career began in this way:

The mystery thrown over the operations of a Type-foundry, within my own recollection (thirty-four years), and the still greater secrecy which had existed in my father's experience, testifies that the art had been perpetuated by a kind of Druidic or Masonic induction from the first. An anecdote of my father's early struggles may illustrate this. At the death of Mr. Joseph Jackson, whom my father had served ten years as apprentice and foreman, there was in progress for the University Press of Oxford a new fount of Double Pica [24-point size] Greek, which had progressed under my father's entire management. The then delegates of that Press--the Rev. Dr. Randolph and the Rev. W. Jackson--suggested that Mr. Figgins should finish the fount himself. This, with other offers of support from those who had previously known him, was the germ of his prosperity (which was always gratefully acknowledged). But when he had undertaken this work, the difficulty presented itself that he did not know where to find the punch-cutter. No one knew his address; but he was supposed to be a tall man, who came in a mysterious way occasionally, whose name no one knew, but he went by the sobriquet of 'The Black Man'. This old gentleman, a very clever mechanic, lived to be a pensioner on my father's bounty—gratitude is perhaps the better word. I knew him and could never understand the origin of his sobriquet, unless Black was meant for dark, mysterious, from the manner of his coming and going from Mr. Jackson's foundry.

Berthold Wolpe investigated the topic of Figgins’ engravers in the 1960s, and found in his records and an annotated specimen that Figgins often commissioned work from two engravers about whom little is known. They were named Perry and Edmiston (or Edmonston), who lived at Alfred Place, Cambridge Heath. Wolpe concluded, however, that "who the mysterious ‘Black Man’…was, we may never be able to find out." John H. Bowman in his research on the history of printing Greek in Britain concluded that the story did not match Figgins or OUP's known output: "I have not found anything answering its description. It may be that it is a mistake [for another, Great Primer or 18pt, font] or indeed perhaps the difficulties of finding "the Black Man" were such that the type was never completed. I do not believe it can be the Double Pica that appears in Figgins' later specimens, for the style of that type would have been impossible at this early date."

Besides his business career, Figgins was a councilman for the ward of Farringdon Without.

Although Thomas Curson Hansard perhaps over-optimistically felt in 1825 that Figgins had "strayed less into the folly of fat-faced, preposterous disproportions, than either Thorne, Fry or Caslon," the other leading London typefounders of the time, Figgins came to sell many innovative, aggressive display typefaces. Mosley suggests that the "unusually large range of lighter types" in his specimens suggest some reservations on his part towards the ultra-bold styles of the period, as does the line in his 1823 specimen book that asks the question "The increased fatness in JOB-LETTER is an improvement, but is it not in many cases carried to an extreme?" He sold many ornamented and inline faces, including "fat face" designs and blackletter faces.

Figgins released the first slab-serif typeface known, which he released under the name Antique in about 1817. It was probably based on earlier lettering models: historian Justin Howes found a use of very similar lettering on a woodblock, advertising a lottery, dated 1810. Critics' comments would range from Nicolete Gray's view of the slab-serif as "the most brilliant typographical innovation of the nineteenth century", to being referred to as a "typographical monstrosity" by Hansard. In recent times, Jonathan Hoefler has described his designs as lumpy: "[it] gives the impression that its designer simply began with one letter and worked his way through the alphabet until the project was complete, never stopping to articulate the design’s policies or anticipate any problems. In many ways, this design is two typefaces, its uppercase and lowercase being almost wholly unrelated." Slab serifs proliferated during the nineteenth century, using alternative names including "Ionics", "Clarendons" and "Egyptians".

Figgins was one of the first typefounders to sell sans-serif faces, and quickly developed a large range of sizes. In Walter Tracy's words, while he did not invent the sans-serif (it had first been cut as a font by 1816 and in custom lettering long before that), "he made the style a reality", and was the first to use the term in print. He first showed a sans-serif, a relatively classical design of medium width, in 1828, before quickly selling a large range of sizes from 1832 onwards. Many of his later sans-serifs were extremely condensed on the model of a Thorowgood face first known from 1830.

Figgins' "fat face" ultra-bold typefaces were serif faces based on the model of Didone letterforms, but with much bolder verticals. Matthew Carter's Elephant (also known as "Big Figgins"), bundled with some Microsoft software, is inspired by the Figgins' fat faces. He also sold patterned faces, and blackletter faces in inline and double-inline versions.

Figgins sold many non-roman types, according to Hansard Greek, Hebrew, Irish, Persian, Saxon, Syriac and Telugu by 1825. Hansard commented in 1825 that "no foundry existing is better stocked with these extraneous sorts...astronomical, geometrical, algebraical, physical, genealogical and arithmetical sorts". He also offered a Pica-size face of Bengali, according to Fiona Ross "perhaps the first to be cut on a commercial basis".

Under the pyrotechnics of Figgins' display faces, his body text faces (which were what he first sold) have received less attention. His earliest faces, being copies of earlier models, are in the late "transitional" style, with affinities to faces such as Caslon, Baskerville and its copy by the Fry Foundry, Bulmer and Bell. Nicolas Barker felt that Figgins' early types "constitute the largest and best of the 'transitional' group, in which the genius of Bodoni was most effectively translated into English." His later text faces are very clearly in the modern or Didone style. Reed speculates that "within a few years of the establishment of his foundry, the public taste...experienced a complete revolution...the circumstance may possibly account for the somewhat remarkable absence of any specimen bearing his name for a lengthened period [up to 1815]." Matthew Carter revived his type for Bensley under the name of "Vincent Text" for Newsweek in 1999.

Figgins ran his foundry until 1836 when he retired to live at 1 Prospect Place, Peckham Rye. He transferred his foundry to his two eldest sons, Vincent Figgins II of Southgate and James Figgins, who issued a first specimen book under their own name in 1838. James Figgins (1811-1884) was elected to Parliament in 1868 as an MP for Shrewsbury.

Figgins died on 29 February 1844 at Peckham Rye, London, and is buried in Nunhead Cemetery. His memorial, shared with his wife Elizabeth, son Vincent and his wife Rosanna, is Grade II listed.

The foundry moved to 3-7 Ray Street, Clerkenwell in 1865, and adjacent buildings on Farringdon Road. The building survives, and is also grade II listed as one of the few surviving type foundry buildings in London. It still retains the original cast iron railings bearing a VJF monogram. For some years the headquarters of Guardian Unlimited, as of 2017 it is the headquarters of Company Pictures.

The styles of Figgins' work became less popular towards the beginning of the twentieth century, with greater interest in the styles of earlier centuries, but attracted attention from the Victoriana revival from the 1930s onwards, with coverage of his work from authors such as Nicolete Gray. By the late nineteenth century it was becoming clear that for large-run printing of body text the future was hot metal typesetting, which cast fresh new type for each printing job, and in the case of the Linotype machine cast each line in rigid blocks. In 1897 Vincent Figgins commented "the Lino is ruining us entirely".

Figgins' foundry was merged by his grandson into the new company Stevens, Shanks & Son in 1933. The materials of Figgins' foundry along with others from Stevens Shanks were acquired by St Bride Library, London, in 1968–73. Its former librarian, James Mosley, who also briefly worked at Stevens Shanks, has written several articles and talks covering Figgins' work.