Slab serif

Slabs were an advertising invention. Nineteenth-century printers needed type that would hold its own on a poster across a street, and squaring the serifs off and fattening them to match the stems gave them something with far more presence than a text serif blown up. They were called Egyptians for no better reason than that Egypt was fashionable at the time.

The category has two ends that barely resemble each other. The old kind is unbracketed and blunt — the serif meets the stem at a corner, with no curve to soften it — and reads as loud. The modern kind keeps the square serifs but puts humanist bones underneath, which produces something friendly and unusually good on screen, because a heavy horizontal survives a low pixel count better than a hairline does.