Robert Thorne

Robert Thorne (1754 – 11 March 1820) was a British type founder and typographer. An apprentice to Thomas Cottrell, who had been an employee of William Caslon, Thorne later acquired Cottrell's type foundry. He was successful in business and left a fortune of £25,000 on his death in 1820. Thorne is buried at Holloway Road Cemetery, where his tomb is extant.

Career

The beginning of Thorne's independent career is not certain; he was recorded as a typefounder in 1785, the year Cottrell died, but is only recorded as having purchased Cottrell's foundry in 1794. (The society minuted approaching him for membership in 1803 but may have been inoperative between then and 1809, when its minute book resumes recording meetings and Thorne is recorded as a member.) According to Thomas Curson Hansard (1825), "the extremely bold and fat letter, now prevalent in job-printing, owes its introduction principally to Mr. Thorne, a spirited and successful letter-founder" and according to William Savage (1822) he "has been principally instrumental in the revolution that has taken place in Posting Bills by the introduction of fat types." Reed wrote that his early types shown in 1798 formed a specimen that is "indeed one of the most elegant of which that famous decade can boast. For lightness, grace and uniformity [it] excels that of almost all his competitors" but that his later typefaces were "exceedingly thick and fat". No full specimen of Thorne's survives for the last decade of his career, and Stanley Morison that he "all but sent printing to perdition at one stroke". More recent writers, such as Nicolete Gray and Paul Barnes, have simultaneously been more complimentary towards his work and cautioned that limited documentation means that his supposed impact on printing trends cannot be confirmed.