In typography, a slab serif (also called mechanistic, square serif, antique or Egyptian) typeface is a type

of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs.[1][2] Serif terminals may be either blunt and
angular (Rockwell), or rounded (Courier). Slab serifs were invented in and most popular during the
nineteenth century.

Slab serifs form a large and varied genre. Some such as Memphis and Rockwell have a geometric design
with minimal variation in stroke width: they are sometimes described as sans-serif fonts with added
serifs. Others such as those of the Clarendon genre have a structure more like most other serif fonts,
though with larger and more obvious serifs.[3][4] These designs may have bracketed serifs which
increase width along their length before merging with the main strokes of the letters, while on
geometrics the serifs have a constant width.

Display-oriented slab serifs are often extremely bold, intended to grab the reader's attention on a
poster, while slab serifs oriented towards legibility at small sizes show less extreme characteristics.
Some fonts oriented towards small print use and printing on poor-quality newsprint paper may have
slab serifs to increase legibility, while their other features are closer to conventional book type fonts.

Slab serif fonts were also often used in typewriters, most famously Courier, and this tradition has meant
many monospaced text fonts intended for computer and programming use are slab serif designs.

Slab serif lettering and typefaces appeared rapidly in the early nineteenth century, having little in
common with previous letterforms. As the printing of advertising material began to expand in the early
nineteenth century, new and notionally more attention-grabbing letterforms became popular.[5] Poster-
size types began to be developed that were not merely magnified forms of book type, but very different
and bolder. Some were developments of designs of the previous fifty years: ultra-bold types known as
"fat faces", which were related to "Didone" text faces of the period but much bolder.[6] Others had
completely new structures: sans-serif letters, based on classical antiquity, and reverse-contrast
letterforms. Some of the type designs appearing around this time may be based on signpainting and
architectural lettering traditions, or vice versa.[a]

The first known example of a slab-serif letterform is woodblock lettering on an 1810 lottery
advertisement from London.[7] Slab-serif type was perhaps first commercially introduced by London
typefounder Vincent Figgins under the name "Antique", appearing in a type-specimen dated 1815 (but
probably issued in 1817).[8]

Writing in 1825, the printer and social reformer Thomas Curson Hansard wrote with amusement that
slab-serif and other such display types were 'the outrageous kind of face only adapted for placards,
posting-bills, invitations to the wheel of Fortune...Fashion and Fancy commonly frolic from one extreme
to another.'[9]

Slab serifs declined following the growing popularity of sans-serif faces, with which they always
competed, and the revival of interest in old-style serif fonts as part of the Arts and Crafts movement.
However, they have been regularly revived and redesigned since the nineteenth century both in
modernised forms and in retro use inspired by the exuberance of Victorian design, a style of design
known as Victoriana.[10] Notable collections of original wood type are held by the Hamilton in
Wisconsin and the University of Texas at Austin, collected by Rob Roy Kelly, writer of a well-known book
on American poster types.[11] Adobe Systems has released a large collection of digitisations inspired by
nineteenth-century wood type.
At first in Britain 'Egyptian' was used for sans-serifs and 'Antique' for slab-serifs; the two names later
somewhat blurred or swapped.[12]

Following Napoleon's Egyptian campaign and dissemination of images and descriptions via publications
like Description de l'Égypte (1809) an intense cultural fascination with all things Egyptian followed.
Suites of contemporary parlor furniture were produced resembling furniture found in tombs.
Multicolored woodblock printed wallpaper could make a dining room in Edinburgh or Chicago feel like
Luxor. While there was no relationship between Egyptian writing systems and slab serif types, either
shrewd marketing or honest confusion led to slab serifs often being called Egyptians.[13] Historian
James Mosley has shown that the first typefaces and letters called 'Egyptian' were apparently all sans-
serifs.[8] However, Egyptian came to refer to slab serifs by the mid and late nineteenth century. Some
twentieth-century slab serifs (ones designed after the modern system of names for fonts had taken
hold[12]), have 'Egyptian' names as a reminder of this: Cairo, Karnak, and Memphis are examples of this.

The term Egyptian was adopted by French and German foundries, where it became Egyptienne. A lighter
style of slab serif with a single width of strokes was called 'engravers face' since it resembled the
monoline structure of metal engravings. The term 'slab-serif' itself is relatively recent, possibly
twentieth-century.[14]

A second aspect in the development of slab-serifs was the influence of geometric design of the 1920s,
and many slab-serifs were produced that had a more monoline structure similar to geometric sans-serifs
also popular around this time, such as Futura.[15] These are called "geometric" designs.

Because of the clear, bold nature of the large serifs, designs with some slab serif characteristics are also
often used for small print, for example in printing with typewriters and on newsprint paper. For
example, Linotype's Legibility Group, in which most newspapers were printed during much of the
twentieth century, were based on the "Ionic" or "Clarendon" style adapted for continuous body text.[16]
[17][18]

More loosely, Joanna, TheSerif, FF Meta Serif and Guardian Egyptian are other examples of newspaper
and small print-orientated typefaces that have regular, monoline serifs (sometimes more visible in bold
weights) but a general humanist text face structure not particularly influenced by nineteenth-century
stylings (as Clarendons are). The term "humanist slab serif" has been applied to serif text faces in this
style.[19][20]

Describing the process of designing slab serifs, modern font designers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias
Frere-Jones note that the structure of the large slab serifs imposes compromises on structure, with
purely geometric designs harder to create in ultra-bold sizes where it becomes impossible to create a
strictly monoline lower-case alphabet, and Clarendon-style designs harder to create in a lighter style.[3]