“In the eighteenth century two great type designers drew English printing, at least temporarily, out of the depths of dullness and ugliness into which it had fallen.
The first of these was the Englishman, William Caslon, whose business was casting, or “founding,” type. Like Nicolas Jenson, Caslon had the skilled eye and hand of an engraver. . . . About 1724 he designed a type that came to be known as “Caslon Old Face,” based largely on the fine letter forms of Jenson but a little less black and heavy, showing the free work of a fine artist. . . .
The other style of roman type designed in the eighteenth century, which had an even greater influence than the “old-style” of Cason for a while, was what came to be known in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as modern. Its most successful designer, perhaps, was Giambattista Bodoni, an Italian printer working at Parma. Bodoni’s modern letters have no gradual shading of thick lines or curves into thin as have the oldstyle; the thicks are very thick and black and the thins are almost hairlines. The serifs, instead of rounding gradually into the stem, are squared off at the ends of the main strokes. Bodoni’s letters make an elegant, sparkling page but not so readable as one of Caslon’s.”

—Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.