What Is Irish Type?

Irish type is a letter style invented in Queen Elizabeth's reign, during the Reformation, to look the way English printers thought Irish readers would want scripture to look.

Tom Foley says the familiar old lettering on Irish pubs and on sayings hung on the wall is a mashup of Anglo-Saxon, half-uncial, and roman forms. Printers produced Church of England texts in Irish and invented Irish types as a naive, antiquated impression of Irish taste. A chronology of those types existed, but it left out the cultural context. Foley wrote a thesis, then asked what Ireland's letters might have become with an evolution of their own. He went back to fifth-century manuscripts. Some academics credit Irish monks with the first true lowercase, and another credits monks of that time with the word space. He says Ireland was then a Catholic rival to Rome and a cultural center. From that research he designed a typeface called Nib, which he later called naive and basic. He had not set out to design typefaces.