‘Titling’ means that the height of each character takes up the full body of the type, and as its name suggests it is used for initial caps at the beginning of a chapter, of for poster work. In the early 1980s Duncan Avery rang from Monotype and said they were scrapping their large press for making Supercaster matrices, was there anything we wanted? We gave it some thought, and Caslon Titling seemed a good choice, as very people would have ordered it over the years [perhaps none?], and it would nicely complete the range of Caslon we already had, 10- to 72-point from Stephenson Blake for hand-setting, and 8- to 24-point as Monotype composition matrices.

It is slow and laborious work casting such a large size on the Supercaster, and it stretches the machine to its limits as it’s a massive amount of metal to pump into the mould for each character. Every few characters to machine has to be allowed to cool so as not to burn out the matrices, which of course are now irreplaceable. We recently cast up 10 founts, and it’s unlikely we shall do it again for some while.