Electra is a serif typeface designed by William Addison Dwiggins and published by the Mergenthaler Linotype Company from 1935 onwards. A book face intended for body text, Dwiggins described the design as intended to be a 'modern roman type letter' with 'personality', avoiding direct revival of any historical model. He therefore chose the name Electra to suggest electricity and crisp modernity, "like metal shavings coming off a lathe". After a slow development process, Electra became a popular book typeface in American printing during the late metal type period. After an eclipse in popularity, partly due to poor translation of the design to modern printing technologies, several revivals have been released. Background After establishing a career as a lettering artist and book designer, Dwiggins was hired as a consultant by the Mergenthaler Linotype Company in 1929 and established a partnership with its head of type design Chauncey H. Griffith, who would manage the production of all his typefaces for the rest of his career. Dwiggins's first typeface was Metro, a sans-serif intended as an answer to new European faces such as Futura and Gill Sans, which were experiencing a vogue. After Metro, Dwiggins set out to design a serif book typeface for long-form reading. His stated intention was to avoid the historical revival approach of most contemporary book faces, which imitated type designs from the Renaissance. Dwiggins marketed the design with a whimsical brochure, Emblems and Electra, in which he claimed the design to be the result of communing with the spirit of Kōbō-Daishi, the Japanese monk famous as a calligrapher and educator. Vincent Connare suggests that Electra's narrow, monoline serifs make it look somewhat similar to the typefaces of Pierre-Simon Fournier in the eighteenth century, and it is for this reason that it is generally classified as "transitional". The swash tail of “Q” is also reminiscent of the types of John Baskerville. In metal, Electra was offered with text figures and two different lengths of descenders; the longer of the two (favored by Dwiggins) required leading, while the shorter could be set solid. The original release of Electra did not include an italic, with Dwiggins instead choosing to offer an oblique in which the letterforms are slanted without taking on any handwriting characteristics; this was apparently influenced by the arguments of Stanley Morison, who promoted the idea as a more appropriate secondary type than a cursive italic. This did not