Cloister Font: Old-Style Roman, Open Face and the Blackletter Distinction

The URW Cloister family describes compact-bodied letters intended for economical text setting. Its listing credits Phil Martin for that digital resource and discusses the earlier Benton design separately. This is a different selection from the Cloister Black guide, which covers Bitstream’s blackletter. Record publisher and full family name before exchanging a sample: selecting the shared word Cloister alone can lead an editor to an entirely different alphabet.

Linotype’s Cloister Open Face account attributes that design to Morris Fuller Benton in 1929 and relates it to Cloister Old Style’s Jensonian roman ancestry. The publisher positions the open-face design for book and magazine titles. Compare a short ARCHIVE LEAF title in its actual specimen with a plain roman text block underneath. Do not interpret Open Face as a command to outline an arbitrary installed font, or assume that its display treatment provides the same text texture as the solid roman.

In its firsthand Sonnets production account, the Petrarch Press describes choosing Cloister Old Style matrices, casting intermediate word spaces when standard widths did not suit the page, and making missing long-s ligatures for original spelling. It also cast custom initials after measuring the chosen leading. Those were physical additions for that edition, not promised features of every digital Cloister file. For a digital poetry page, settle the longest line and leading, inspect the required historical characters, then size the initial against that established grid. The homepage Unicode text experiments change characters; they do not supply the press’s custom metal sorts or an installed Cloister family.