Bookman (typeface)

Bookman, or Bookman Old Style, is a serif typeface. A wide, legible design that is slightly bolder than most body text faces, Bookman has been used for both display typography, for trade printing such as advertising, and less commonly for body text. In advertising use it is particularly associated with the graphic design of the 1960s and 1970s, when revivals of it were very popular. It is also used as the official font of Indonesian laws since 2011.

Bookman evolved from fonts known as Old Style Antique, released around 1869. These were created as a bold version of the "Old Style" typeface, which had been cut by Alexander Phemister around the 1850s for the Miller & Richard foundry and become a standard, popular book typeface. Old Style Antique has letterforms similar to those of the eighteenth-century typeface Caslon, with a more even and regular structure, a wide and tall lower-case, and little contrast in line width.

Bookman is much bolder than the original Old Style, to which it was intended to be a bold complement, almost to the point of being a slab serif, and evolved its own identity, with American Type Founders giving it its own name and a distinctive set of swash characters, with which it is often associated. The 1924 textbook Introduction to Advertising described Bookman as having "the impression of reliability without heaviness".