The Caslon Font On The Lisbonaire

This is a screen grab showing the header font from The Lisbonaire.

The Lisbonaire is a website advertising a block of apartments in a building in downtown Lisbon, with 19 studios and one bedroom apartments – “furnished and decorated, subject to the idea of 100% Portuguese”.

I came across The Lisbonaire on clicking a link in an article in the New York Times that my wife recommended to me – How I Fell For Lisbon

I liked the font in the header of The Lisbonaire, but I couldn’t identify it.

The letter ‘a’ looked a bit like Adobe Caslon Pro, which I have, but that’s a lot thinner – so it wasn’t the font. And the general look was similar to the Encorpada and Salome fonts, but taller and more elegant.

So I asked for help to identify the font on the WhatTheFont forum at MyFonts – and someone came up with the answer, which is Caslon Graphique D.

As I said, the letter ‘a’ is similar to Adobe Caslon Pro, and that got me wondering about the origin of the name ‘Caslon’.

It seems that Caslon fonts are owned by a German company but the Caslon company name belongs to Caslon – a letterpress printing firm in London.

Here are a few of the interesting things about Caslon:

• William Caslon, an engraver of firearms from the West Midlands, started his career in type design in 1720 when he created a typeface for the New Testament in Arabic.
• In 1776, just before the 4th of July, a printer from Philadelphia called John Dunlap used Caslon Old Face when he printed the American Declaration of Independence.
• Caslon Egyptian Type was the first sans-serif printing type to be sold commercially.
• The Caslon Typeface was the main font used by the British Arts and Crafts movement.