Roman, Part I - History and the evolution of the serif

The modern European letters have their roots in Roman and Greek. The Greeks did not seems to have shared the Roman passion for carving writing in stone; and how fortunate that the Romans did. It seems hard to imagine that we were that close to writing Uncial and Gothic instead of Roman, but the revival of Roman letters only came when Ren
aissance scholars found Roman letters carved in relics.

Romans never actually wrote in the letters that we now call Roman. Manuscripts suggest that they had an everyday script which was written with a broad edge pen (most likely to be a reed pen of sorts). Thus it was a sans serif script in the beginning. The modern serifed Roman was an engravers script which cannot be "written" properly without undue exertion, in fact serifed letters were only found in carvings. The rationale for the creation of the serif, or rather it's postulated evolutionary steps from the pen written daily script, had been outlined by Wotzkow in the book "The Art of Hand Lettering". Here I borrow the reasoning and the illustrations from the book.

Wotzkow argues that incised Roman letter might well have started out as a copy of pen letters, i.e.
But it was difficult to obtain good optical spacing with slanted endings, thus the masons decided to flatten the legs of the letters and made them horizontal, like this:This created a technical problem as it was hard to get sharp corners with straight edges when carving stone, thus and extra cut was added to sharpen the corner. This meant that corners would become wider than the stroke. That had the extra advantage in that it looked really good, so masons enlarged it beyond the necessary proportions and it became the serif as we know today.