Pizzas galore!

Digitised versions were available before Howes began work on it, but through these successive generations, the authenticity of the face had been compromised. “In our own time,” Howes wrote, “the result of redrawing is, unavoidably, type design which edges ever closer to this period’s dominant letter form, Times New Roman.”

Computers allow a font to be readily magnified or minified, but this is rarely satisfactory because, as the old punchcutters knew, letters fit together visually in different ways at different sizes. A headline letter is different from a text letter. Accordingly, the original metal Caslon in 12pt is appreciably different from the 30pt and from 42pt. Instead of averaging out their features and producing a bland compromise, Howes returned to Caslon’s own specimen sheets and digitised these three sizes, plus a poster-size letter.

He was chairman of the Friends of the St Bride Printing Library, and in 1998 his digitised version of Founder’s Caslon was seen for the first time in a booklet for them, Founder’s London, in which he and Nigel Roche offered a historical tour of the typographical monuments and byways of the capital, such as Ullmer & Son on Gray’s Inn Road and the Fry Foundry in Cripplegate. Howes later issued the 11 remaining Caslon type sizes through his own company, H. W. Caslon.

At St Bride he delved into the vast trove of material about Gill, coming up with a keepsake for the Wynken de Worde Society that shows the successive states of an engraved title page from 1914.

Busy as ever, he spoke in 1999 at the Grolier Club, New York, and in 2002 at the Art Workers’ Guild in Queen Square — where he spoke on Typographical Monstrosities: From Sanserifs to the Euro. Meanwhile, for the British Library he designed the immaculate editions of the Tyndale and Wycliffe translations of the New Testament, both edited by W. R. Cooper (2000 and 2002).

Howes’s latest projects included curating an exhibition for the British Library and research towards a Reading University doctorate about the development of letter forms and concepts of lettering, 1680-1830. He had also been involved in the development of two new typefaces, just released, for the centenary this year of Sheffield University — to which Stephenson Blake had been a major benefactor.

The new edition of Matrix — No 24 — includes Howes’s documentation of giant sizes of Caslon and how he discovered a craftsman in Chatham who could cast them in sand — the first time the process had been used for letters in 200 years.

Howes, who died at his desk, was just about to embark on a six-month visit to the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Amsterdam. It had been a dream for him to spend time there casting letters and working with the 16th and 17th-century materials.

He was not married. He is survived by his parents.

Justin Howes, typographer and historian, was born on April 4, 1963. He died of a heart attack on February 21, 2005, aged 41.