Script typefaces
An acquaintance, type designer Paul Shaw, is preparing a book on script typefaces and is looking for photos of the actual metal fittings of Palace Script, Typo Upright, Carpenter Script, and Centennial Script. He is interested in seeing how the angled bodies fit together and how different kerning strategies would have worked. Anybody still have any of these?
I have Typo Script and would be willing to get some close-up photos of it if that would assist. I believe I have 18 & 24pt sizes, nothing larger.
Send me an email if that would help Paul out. Maybe there are particular combinations which he would like to see.
John Henry
I have some Palace Script. It is body text, size 14 or 18 from memory. What kind of shots does he want. Kerning pairs, lines of letters?
-Mike day
Hi Gerald,
I have a fair amount of 18pt Monotype Palace Script with thin, mid and thick spacers, and end of line converters to get the line upright again (never enough of these) and, ahem, still use it occasionally, tho it is quite fragile. Happy to take some photos for Paul, just let me know what you would like.
Best wishes,
Paul
p.s. I understand that Monotype Palace Script is a bit different from Stephenson Blake’s,
Hi all.
I think it best if I get Paul Shaw over here to respond to these himself.
Thanks.
Gerald
thanks Gerald and everyone else.
The book I am working on is about digital script typefaces. For the intro I want to show readers the complicated ways that type founders and composing machine companies adapted bodies to accommodate the slope and joining needs of scripts. What I know of this comes from McGrew and Legros and Grant (and Rich Hopkins). There were faces designed to fit on regular upright bodies (like Typo Upright); faces with some letters awkwardly designed to fit upright bodies (Linotype scripts?), faces with angled bodies and triangular end spaces, faces with bodies that zigged and zagged (apparently Firmin Didot innovated these c.1806), faces with upright bodies and jogs to accommodate kerning (McGrew shows this and I have a sample of some Italian wood type in this manner), and finally wing bodies (upright bodies with angled letters that kern over in a cantilevered manner the preceding and/or succeeding letter). I have photographs from Darmstadt and Cornuda of the latter but the types are not identified so I cannot match them with a proof. I do not have photos of any of the other methods (other than the limited wood type mentioned).
Besides needing photos of strategies I would like printed samples. My preferred text would space efghi space. The f is always the hardest letter to solve, g is a descender, h an ascender and the e and i provide controls (though the dot of i is also a problem in some fonts).
Although Gerald mentioned that I was looking for four specific faces, I really do not need them. What I need is the different bodies and proofs of type set with them (both normally space and opened up—so that the method of fitting can be shown). The faces I mentioned to Gerald happened to be the only digital ones that seemed plausible for this purpose. But I am open to any other fonts (such as the Lydian Cursive someone posted; a face I had not considered). Point size is not crucial, though I would like something 24 pt or larger just to make things easier to see.
(And I would love to get a Linotype/Intertype script to show the affect of duplexing.)
Many thanks.
Paul Shaw
Here is what I have from Darmstadt.
IMG_0089lores.jpg
I can post up pictures on Monday but I
have a script face with zig-zagged sorts
and the triangular end spaces.
Have a look at what Pascal Marty wrote about the Didot anglaises: http://www.visorion.fr/?p=667#comments
Sorry, it’s in French, but very interesting…
A couple of photos from the Calligraphiques noires
call_noires_3.JPG
call_noires_4.JPG
Call_noires.JPG
call_noires_2.JPG
To be more comprehensive, you might want to take a look also at the way Ludlow used angled matrices for scripts. My Ludlow mat collection isn’t good enough for me to know whether they used angled mats for all of their scripts, but Coronet, at least, was cut on the same style of angled matrix regularly used for italic. At least one face, Formal Script, was cut on an even more slanted matrix (requiring a special stick - though you could cast both types of slanted mats on roman sticks using appropriate solid triangular mats at each end).
I could cast slugs of Coronet and Formal Script for you, if you needed them (but others here have much larger Ludlow collections and could no doubt cast examples of all of Ludlow’s script faces).
If you just need specimens, you could get them from the Ludlow specimen books. See, especially, the Edition D of “Ludlow Typefaces” halfway down the page at:
http://www.circuitousroot.com/artifice/letters/press/noncompline/ludlow/...
Regards,
David M.
www.CircuitousRoot.com