Why some fonts have serifs
Those “little feet” that some typefaces display seem natural and indispensable, but they are just the result of a cultural misunderstanding.
Serifs are those little legs that ends the strokes of some letters. They are not part of the structure, they are not the stroke itself but an ornament. We could do without but it still seems normal for us to find it and that even gives letters like the “i” or “l” a better hold. You will see them in most book typefaces, and you are probably seeing them right now if you are reading this in a newspaper, a magazine, and maybe on your computer screen.
Broadly speaking (I hope no typographer reads this) we could say that the serif letters are what we call “Roman”, not because they come directly from ancient Rome, but because those who invented this style — the Italian printers of the late 15th century — would like to have been. The letters created by Nicolas Jenson or Francesco Griffo, unlike the rough letters of Gutenberg as early as three decades before, did not copy Gothic writing but humanist style forms of handwriting. A calligraphic style of letters made with a pen was practiced by figures like Petrarch in an age where writing well and having nice handwriting were one in the same. For the people of the Renaissance humanist handwriting was an idealized way of writing like Virgil, although actually that handwriting did not have much to do with the humanist. To begin with, Virgil did not even know what a lowercase letter was.
Transferring humanist writing to individual metal movable type was not an easy task because Italian printers had to choose between the different lettering methods that each author had, and on top of that, humanist writing did not have uppercase letters. To complete the character set, something very typical of the Italian Renaissance was made: they copied the forms of the Roman inscriptional capital, a majestic letter from the imperial era that was carved in stone following the forms that had previously been painted using a brush. And this is where the serif appears.
The capital letters were converted to metal and with them, the characteristic endings of the brush strokes were transferred to the lowercase shapes. This is what we know today as a Roman letter, a typographic style that seems natural and beautiful to us but which was originally a kind of Frankenstein’s monster where letters originally drawn in brush were mixed with letters in pen and ink. This aberration has barely been altered five hundred years later and this style of font is still the one predominantly used in books.
It’s a relatively new discovery that the serif comes from the brush stroke. In fact, many typography manuals still say that serif form is a chisel finish to visually balance the letters or to contain rainwater. The one who discovered its true origin was Edward Catich, an American Catholic priest who before joining the priesthood had worked as a sign painter. After several trips to Rome during the 1950’s, Catich offered the brush serif theory. Catich especially studied the plaque at the base of the Trajan Column in the Rome forum, dating from 114 AD. If you have a Macintosh, a typographic version of this letter is probably available in the font menu, the famous Trajan from Adobe. It is a 2000 year living fossil. They added letters that the Romans did not have, such as the “U” or “W”, numbers and other signs, but in terms of the rest it is just as good as what you’ll find in Rome.
With the industrial revolution the typographic letter leaves books and begins to be used also to announce and to sell. Larger, more colorful letters are needed, and ornate styles appear as well as san-serif letters. What we thought was essential, the serif that hold the letters up, is now just a stylistic option.