Old Bible Typography Versals

Carl Shank • April 19, 2024

My wife and I took a trip to Washington, D.C. to the Museum of the Bible. This is an amazing place with collections of Bible history, Bible characters and Bible applications for the interested viewer. We especially toured the fourth floor that contains more than 600 artifacts and 50 media programs introducing us to the Bible's history, from handwritten scrolls to mobile devices.


As a theologian and typographer, I was interested in not merely the history of the printed Word of God, but also how it was printed through the ages. I was especially fascinated by the delicate and intricate versals, those opening letters and flourishes to the printing. I have gathered a number of the versals and cleaned them up using Adobe Photoshop for display.



The pages below contains some of the oldest versals used in Bible typography and printing. They are historically valuable and worth our time and effort in viewing and understanding. Enjoy them!

Successful Layout & Design

Linotype's Party Emblems in 1920

By Carl Shank • July 29, 2026
Linotype's Party Emblems in 1920 . Type follows and often mimics cultural fashions and ideas. Consequently, Victorian type flowed with the ornamentation of that period. Punk and Grunge type traced with a rebellious period in American culture. The political landscape of the 1920s was shaped by the aftermath of World War I, economic prosperity, social change, and debates over the role of government. While the specific parties differed by country, the decade is most often discussed in terms of the United States, where the Republican Party dominated national politics. Being a major typesetter for the period, Linotype issued characters that reflected the political parties and feelings of the times. Such type emblems showed up in their 1920 publication of One Line Specimens .

The Legibility Group

By Carl Shank • July 29, 2026
The Legibility Group . This group of typefaces comes from the the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, a company founded in the United States in 1886 to market the Linotype machine, a system to cast metal type in lines (linecaster) invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler. The company became the world's leading manufacturer of newspaper and book typesetting equipment. The Legibility Group is a series of serif typefaces intended for use in newspapers on Linotype's hot metal typesetting system. They were developed in-house by Linotype's design team, led by Chauncey H. Griffith and released from 1925, when the first member, Ionic No. 5, appeared. The family became a large group due to the creation of slightly different designs for different printing conditions, such as levels of inking used in different newspaper production processes and versions with different x-heights. It consisted of Ionic No. 5, Textype, Excelsior, Opticon, Paragon and Corona. Although not part of the family, Linotype marketed its sans-serif family Metro and slab serif face Memphis as effective complements for headings.
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