The name Doric, like Ionic, references one of the classical orders of architecture. Caslon had already embraced the condensed sans form of the 1830s, though none of these types had gained a name, merely being described by size. It is of a style that one might find on the pedestal of a Victorian statue. The R has a straight-legged tail, and the G is without a crossbar. Strokes end in flat horizontal terminals. It is a bold weight, round in design, but not geometric. The form is wider than Figgins’s first regular width style. The Doric first appeared as all-capitals, both filled and as outline at the beginning of the 1840s.
The speed of acceptance of the sans can be gauged by the international spread of the form during the 1830s, with sans styles almost simultaneously appearing across Europe and the United States as a result of importing designs from Britain and local development. It was never used for pages of continuous reading matter. In Britain, sans serif was principally a display style, set in all-capitals, even when used at smaller sizes. The lowercase form, however, was a rarity. Created in large sizes, these early examples show the considerable impact a sans could bring to the page, at first as bold-weighted capitals of a normal width and then in a condensed form. It was only in the late 1820s when Figgins (who first used the name sans serif), then later the Thorowgood foundry (who chose the name Grotesque), introduced styles that appear familiar to us. No contemporary usages of it seem to exist or survive. When William Caslon IV introduced his sans typeface sometime around 1816, it was met with disinterest. Even though it is a letterform we readily accept across almost all our channels of communication, it took nearly sixty years for the British foundries to make the regular weight and width of this sans form so familiar to us today. From a simple all-capital starting point, it grew through subsequent decades into the utilitarian letterform, suitable for multiple applications, that we both recognize and use today with little or no thought. The appearance and later acceptance of sans serif as a type form was one of the most significant changes in nineteenth-century typography.
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