font_foundry: Solotype

This is one of the Victorian standards for job printing issued by the Barnhart Brothers and Spindler Foundry about 1891. It looks old without being decorative, a good counterpoint to fancier types in today¹s...

Another design inspired by Chinese characters, but with a somewhat less obvious treatment than many.

Loosely based on an early 20th century type from the Brussels foundry of Van Loey-Nouri. Many European foundries had fonts of this general design. Schelter & Gieseke of Germany had several.

This is derived from the Marder, Luce foundry’s face called Rivet. A nip and a tuck here and there plus the addition of a lowercase make this into a potentially useful font.

This began life as a European font that was copied in the United States by Bruce’s Type Foundry in 1885. It was caps only and had a fine line “three-D” shadow. We scrapped the...

MacKeller, Smiths and Jordan had a font called Giraffe Wide which we liked, but like many Victorian display fonts it had no lowercase. We fixed that!

This is a Vanderburgh and Wells wood type cap font from 1877. We don’t know if the originators made a lowercase for it, but we did. Most effective in larger sizes.

Apparently original with the Lindsay brothers type foundry in New York shortly before they were merged into the American Type Founders Company. A few characters of the original font have been modified slightly to...

A Barnhart Bros. & Spindler type from the late victorian period. We have been faithful to the spirit of the original buy “calmed down” a few of the lowercase letters to make the lines...

Our font of the original was only ten point, so we had to use our imagination to a great extent. As specialists in Victorian typography, we have found that many people do not like...