Amaericana and News Gothic

Oops - upside down. Sorry.

Americana (ATF #727) appears to be the bold face. In 1966 the extra bold was the last typeface released by ATF. Americana was designed by Richard Isbell at Headliners, Inc., in Detroit. It was the first, and probably the only hot metal typeface having the ? and ! superimposed as one character and called an interrobang, ATF spelled it interabang.
News Gothic, copied from some of ATF’s predecessors, was redesigned by Morris F. Benton in 1908, in several weights.
Ludlow issued their Record Gothics in about a dozen variations, light, bold, condensed, italics, extended, reverse, etc., etc. These were patterned after News Gothic, which was Ludlow’s name for their face up till 1956, when R. Hunter Middleton redesigned, enlarged and renamed the Record Gothics as one of their last attempts at hot metal. I believe sometime after ATF’s acquisition of Monotype in 1961, I had seen Monotype display size mats of News Gothic with ATF’s numbers on the cap “H” and lower case “M”

I have a short flickr posting on Americanna at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/53177163@N00/sets/72157626458523930/

and what little information about this type face that I have found on the internet, primarily from the digital type foundries is incorrect in substantive manner. I have most of the original artwork for the entire series that came from the 1993 ATF auction.

Fritz