This is sample of the Starling font as sold by the Font Bureau of Cambridge. The Roman (and Bold) members of the family resemble Monotype's Times New Roman fairly closely, but the Italics seem to have more life to them.

There is an alternate story for the origin of Monotype’s Times New Roman. Like many old stories it has proven difficult to verify. The dubious path winds circuitously through the shipyards of an American yacht designer in Marblehead, MA, named William Starling Burgess. He was a multitalented designer of experimental aircraft, racing yachts, and the Dymaxion automobile.

At some point he had an association with the American Lanston Monotype Company and had begun at least one typeface design for them. This was around 1904, but by 1910, he had gone into business with the Wright Brothers and was designing airplanes for them. So, as the story goes, Burgess returned the drawings to Monotype. At some point, they were forwarded to Stanley Morrison who, as you recall from the previous blog, had started his redesign of a new font for use by the London Times. The font created from the Burgess drawings is sold today under the name of “Starling.” and looks strikingly like Times New Roman.

The drawings no longer exist. Neither does any correspondence from Burgess, supposedly requesting that the font be used for his yacht company for internal documents. Let the record show that the Monotype Corporation lost some files in a bombing raid during WW2 in London, and both Monotype's offices in Canada and Burgess's facility in Marblehead were flooded at various times. There could also have been correspondence to or from the American Monotype company, owned most recently by Gerald Giampa. It was likely he who passed on the Burgess drawings to Mike Parker — are you still following this??— who had been the Director of Typography for the Merganthaler Linotype Company during their conversion from metal to phototype through the 1980s. Parker went on to co-found Bitstream, the first digital type foundry. It was Mike Parker who created The Starling font in its digital format for the Font Bureau of Cambridge. 

Parker started the story of Burgess’s authorship of the typeface as the original Times New Roman at a type conference in 1994. Was it true or false? Having met Mike Parker on a couple of occasions, at least once when he was still at Merganthaler, I recall him as a rather garrulous individual and quite a raconteur. I can easily picture him starting a mythical story about the origins of Times New Roman. 
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Going back over the facts from my last blog entry, it makes sense that Stanley Morrison didn’t draw the fonts as he wasn’t a designer himself. And his associate, Victor Lardent wasn’t a true type designer, either, but a lettering artist for Monotype. As I mentioned previously, it makes sense that Morrison was perfectly capable of art directing Lardent’s work, whatever the source. In addition, when I looked up Times New Roman in MyFonts.com, William Starling Burgess is listed as the designer. It should be noted that MyFonts was started by Bitstream, Mike Parker’s company. 

The following is from Font Bureau’s description of the Starling family on their web site: 
     “In 1904 William Starling Burgess, Boston racing sailor, designed his second type.
     Six years later, now the Wright Brothers’ partner, Starling quit type, returning
     the drawings to Monotype. Frank Pierpont collected the nameless roman for
     British Monotype, passing it to Stanley Morison in 1932 for The London Times.
     Mike Parker found the original superior, and prepared this Starling series for
​     Font Bureau, who found it to be ‘the right stuff’.” — Font Bureau, 2009

You can read more of the convoluted story on Luc DeVroye’s site:
​                 http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-24415.html

​This is an expanded version of what I recently posted in my newsletter.

It's the saga of what I used to call the world’s most boring typeface: Times Roman. I called it boring because Times was ubiquitous. For a while it was the default font for Microsoft Word as well as the required font for college papers and technical documents in industry. I personally worked on various versions of this font about 6 times for two different phototypesetting companies and the actual digital versions you use on your computers today—both Times Roman and Times New Roman. You have undoubtedly used them and probably take them for granted now, so here’s the common story behind the two Times fonts, which usually goes something like this:
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The original typeface used by the British newspaper, The (London) Times (founded in 1785), wasn’t officially named "Times," but was referred to as “the Times font,” or “the typeface used by The Times.” In 1931, The Times of London commissioned a new text type design from Stanley Morison and the Monotype Corporation. This was a couple years after Morison had written an article criticizing The Times for being badly printed and typographically behind the times (sic). The Times had been using a “modern” type for the previous 100 years, but by the 1920s, it appeared rather outdated, according to Morison. The overall look and feel of The Times was a good example of type having a “voice”—in this case, it looked like what people expected from a newspaper. It was similar to many types used during the 19th Century.

This is a sample of a typical "modern" or :"Didone" typeface used for books and newspapers during the 1800s.

This is Exselcior, a from Linotype's Legibility Group developed in the 1920s. Notice the similarities to the Modern example shown above.

The first of this series was called Ionic and looked very much like Century Schoolbook. Others followed, such as Excelsior and Textype and even Corona (!). Many newspapers are still using these fonts or variations of them. Why did it take so long to long to develop these new fonts? One reason has to do with aesthetics. Any new typeface, even today, needs to go through a series of editing cycles to determine if the design will actually fulfill its intended purpose. What looks good on pencil and paper may not pass muster when it comes to looking good in print. In the case of the Times New Roman font, there were experiments going on simultaneously. Two other Monotype fonts were being modified and tested at the same time: one was Eric Gill’s Perpetua. The other was Plantin, which was a stately old Dutch design that looks quite similar to Times, but just a little heavier. It’s still used today in many British publications. There was another other reason didn’t occur to me for a while, even as a seasoned type designer. Back in the era when type manufacturing companies were producing “new” fonts for their customers, the designers were tasked with determining the best design size and proportions to use. The 10 point a, b, or c you see on your computer monitor now, looks essentially like the exact same design when enlarged to 24 point. When type was “cut” and

The “and"s in black are actual Times Roman printed samples scaled to the same size. The one in magenta is the digital font reduced to match the 9 and 10 point samples. Try and see the design differences between them. They are created to be legible at the smaller sizes that newspapers use. molded from metal there were subtle proportion changes necessary to maintain legibility from 10 point size to 72 point sizes. It’s very possible that you wouldn’t recognize a line of 7, 8, or 9 point Times Roman (printed in 1932) as being the same design as a 24 point headline sample from the same typeface. Or maybe you would. The samples above are more recognizable than I anticipated, but you can see that the thin portions are actually designed heavier for better legibility at the reading sizes. The digital font has software instructions called “hints” the ensure that the thin portions (called hairlines) do not disappear on the computer screen at the smaller sizes now.  Designing a new type in 1932, meant creating a 9 point alphabet (the size at which it would be used in the newspaper) and probably 8 and 10 point, as well. The resulting design and printed copy would then need to be compared to the existing 8, 9, and 10 point designs for corresponding legibility and quality. No quick or easy task. Any changes deemed necessary, would require another alphabet to be cut. Compare this to making changes to vector shapes today in a program like Adobe Illustrator. You’re talking about days now verses weeks or months back then. So you can see why you cannot exactly rush a brand new design to market in 1932. Especially if the product in question has to be reviewed by a committee. ​The Times “New Roman” fonts did make it to print and the London Times did get a new look. Was it earth-shaking? Perhaps not, but it did receive a generally good reception. The Times and Monotype did release the new deign for commercial sale a year later for the American Linotype Company. It was not a rousing success with US newspapers but by the end of World War 2 (the mid 1940s) it had found a comfortable market in book publishing. [I suppose this part may sound like “piracy,” but before the advent of true digital outline font technology, if you were a printing company that needed to set type, you would purchase a photo typesetting device from companies such as Compugraphic or Itek (two companies I worked for) but it was also necessary to purchase compatible fonts for those machines. Our customers wanted Times Roman and Helvetica or something that looked like them. So, we as designers created “similar to” versions of these fonts.] And now, the rest of the story: Qui Bene? or, Follow the money. This is a short version of a longer story. In 1985, Steve Jobs started selling his Apple Laser Writer printer with 35 scalable PostScript® fonts. The “advantage” had been the bitmapped fonts that were part of the original Macintosh operating system. Not high quality, but they were better than the dot matrix fonts that you saw on your cash register receipt from Walmart, Walgreen's or your gas station. These new fonts were genuine scalable PostScript® fonts from our old friend Linotype, which was getting out of the typesetting machine (photo and digital, by now) business and concentrating on the digital fonts from their library going back to the 1920s—fonts that professional typographers and printers used. This was a big plus for Apple. But it wasn’t long before Bill Gates and Microsoft decided they wanted to cash in on this growing and very profitable side of the graphic arts and printing business. The story gets a little peculiar at this point. Microsoft was, at that time, developing a new operating system called Windows (3.1 to be exact). It was going to ship with scalable fonts called TrueType® that didn’t need a specially equipped printer, as did the Postscript technology. The interesting part was that the TrueType fonts were a joint venture with . . . Apple. The fonts being shipped were the same fonts that Apple was packaging —except they were from Monotype, which was now in the font business, too. Linotype still had rights to Times Roman and Monotype had the rights to—you guessed it—Times New Roman. The benefit was to Microsoft because, in a sense, they had the original Times New Roman and paid royalties to Monotype, through a re-negotiated contract. Other fonts, such as Bookman, are also licensed to Monotype. Apple paid their font royalties to Linotype, so I assume everyone is happy. Well, that’s most of the story. There are a few more details in this blog post. But Times and Times New Roman are now available to virtually everyone and remain quite popular. If you are interested in the design differences between the two different families, there are charts and samples readily available online. A quick Google search will give you everything you want and probably more.  If you want to make your own character-by-character chart, Just type out an alphabet line of the lower case italic for both TNR and TR and look at the lower case z. Next compare the figure 5 in the Roman (or Regular} versions. Definitely different but not a deal breaker for most (like 99.9%) of all users. As mentioned, they’re the same but different. And now you know most of the story. ​And yes, there is more. This part is rather unusual, so I’m surprised it isn’t more widely known. It has to do with a boat designer and sometime font designer who eventually went to work for the Wright Brothers of Kitty Hawk fame.  And, by the way, Times Roman defies a category; you may find it listed under Old Style or Transitional.  ​ (to be continued . . .) ​

Another Typical Example of Free Fonts in Use