font_foundry: Solotype

An old wood type we picked up in London from the Fredrick Ullmer Company. It’s not marked, and we’ve never seen it in a catalog, so we don’t know who made it. We like...

This is a neat lightface font from the 1880s, issued by MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan of Philadelphia. Just a hint of Victorian design on a few letters. All in all a clean, easy to...

This font was inspired by the embossed lettering on cigar boxes. The letters, or entire words, are often surrounded by raised dots, and that was our idea here. We drew this about 1997, and...

Many fonts have carried this name. Ours goes back to just before 1900 in France. This general style had considerable popularity among job printers all over Europe. We have even seen it used for...

The devil does indeed find work for idle hands. This was designed by Dan X. Solo about with no excuse whatsoever. The name comes from the fact that a circus that we regularly did...

This interesting type was introduced by the Chicago firm of Marder, Luse & Company in 1890, about the time designers were beginning to lose some of the excessive ruffles and flourishes that characterized the...

A neat face with pronounced spur serifs which several foundries have already digitized. We like ours better though, because we have drawn a lowercase which was lacking in the original. Barnhart Bros. & Spindler...

Here is a wood type from Tubbs & Co., about 1900. Its lack of decoration reflects the changes that were rapidly occurring in the design of printed pieces at the beginning of the 1900s....