font_designer: Dan Solo

Here’s a wide, very light version of the widely known font P. T. Barnum (or French Clarendon, if you prefer). We have used this to good effect as secondary lines on old fashioned stationery....

This was a patented design, so we know who designed it and when. August Will was a type cutter who sold his work to a number of foundries. We worked over this design to...

You will see this in the old type catalogs as Dainty. Late in the nineteenth century, type founders developed a number of fonts with a “pen-drawn” look. They wanted to complete with the work...

The Barnhart Bros. & Spindler foundry put out a caps-only face called Dante. We liked it, but felt it needed a lowercase. The result here is a rather nice square design, which has become...

Many years ago, we bought a bunch of proofs that had apparently come from the defunct Van Loey-Nouri foundry in Belgium. Cognac was an incomplete alphabet among them, which we completed. Just a guess,...

The Stephenson Blake foundry in England, made two fonts, Flemish Expanded and Flemish Condensed. In our view, one was too wide, the other too narrow; so we redrew it and renamed it Brussels. Why...

Here’s a great old face from the H. W. Caslon foundry in London; a real workhorse. The lowercase is eminently readable, so you can set entire paragraphs to good effect. We don’t recommend it...

Authentic copy of the original, with a couple of minor changes to the caps, making them fit better. Although made for the American market by an American typefounder, we found this font in a...

Originally made in seven sizes, 6 to 48 point. Our font was digitized from the 24 point which we found in 1947 in a Sparks, Nevada, newspaper shop. Typical of the late nineteenth century...