↑ This can make tracing the descent of sans and slab-serif styles hard, since a trend can arrive in print directly and without apparent precedent from a signpainting tradition which has left less of a record.
↑ Whether Figgins' foundry produced the very first slab-serif is a question that is unlikely to be ever confirmed, but Nicolete Gray felt that "it seems probable"[8] as his is the first foundry with a surviving specimen showing them. This first Figgins specimen to show them was an "1815" specimen containing 1817 watermarked paper, held by Oxford University Press; other 1815-dated Figgins specimens do not show it; another "1815" specimen that was held by Stephenson Blake with 1820 on the spine shows more.[8] No specimens are known from Figgins' main rivals who produced many slab serifs, the Caslon and Thorne (later Thorowgood) foundries, over the relevant period. Figgins had four sizes in ป. 1817, nine ป. 1820, and nineteen in a specimen dated 1821[8] but containing 1823 pages;[9] no Caslon specimens are known between 1816 and 1821 but the first surviving specimen from Caslon to show slab-serifs dates from 1821 and shows eleven sizes.[8][10] Thorne had four sizes in 1820.[11] Even fewer specimens survive from other foundries; none are known from Bower and Bacon between 1813 and 1826, by which time they had eighteen sizes.[12] Gray concluded that any of Figgins, Thorowgood and Caslon could have been first to issue a lower-case (already seen on the 1810 woodblock), as they all introduced ones around 1820.[13]
