“In vain!” Selling Auriol as a text typeface with Craig Eliason

This talk took place on October 12, 2026 as part of Type@Cooper's Herb Lubalin Lecture Series. This video archive is made possible by the generous support of TypeCulture. Typefaces are often categorized as either “display types” (attention-grabbing designs made for short bursts of text, often large) or “text types” (unobtrusive designs in small point sizes that are comfortable for longer reads). In the early twentieth century, the Parisian typefoundry Peignot et Fils released the Auriol family. With its blobby and disconnected shapes, Auriol rightly came to be celebrated as the premier Art Nouveau display type. What has been forgotten is that Peignot also cast, showed, and sold Auriol fonts as text faces. This talk examines the development and publicizing of the Auriol family, arguing that its promotion as a text face, while not commercially successful, was remarkably innovative. Craig Eliason is a design historian who earned a Ph.D. in Art History from Rutgers University. He has presented and published research on the history of type classification, the influences on modern-face types and their receptions, and the relationship of “text” to “display” typography in the Auriol type family. He is researching a book on the letterforms that emerged in various American crafts and trades between 1780 and 1940. He also designs digital types under the brand Teeline Fonts. He is a Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he has been teaching since 2002.