An unsold 1973 TV pilot for the series “Catch 22” (based on Joseph Heller’s 1961 book and the subsequent 1970 movie) had its title hand lettered in an extra bold stencil type style. Heller coined the phrase as a satire on absurd military rules and bureaucracy. Although the show’s title provided only five characters to work with, there was enough inspiration there to create the military styled Enlisted Stencil JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions. According to Wikipedia: “A catch-22 is a paradoxical situation from which an individual cannot escape because of contradictory rules or limitations.”

Lewis F. Day, in his book Alphabets Old and New, offered this typeface as an example from sixteenth-century England of lettering incised in wood. The font is essentially monocase, but there several lowercase letters are alternate letterforms. Please note that, due to the ornate nature of the letterforms, this font does not contain math operators, fractions or superior numbers. Both versions of the font include 1252 Latin and 1250 CE (with localization for Romanian and Moldovan) character sets.