One of the original nineteenth century designs, cut at Barnhart Brothers & Spindler in Chicago about 1880, passed on to us through ATF. Unlike most Circus types, the serifs of P.T. Barnum are bracketed.

This font set is based on Frank Lloyd Wright's hand-lettering found on the Chicago Midway Gardens working drawings from 1913. This type of architectural lettering is a bit more casual than standard lettering found on most blueprints. It evokes the personality of Frank Lloyd Wright and complements the other fonts in the P22 FLW font series. Midway One and Midway Two can be used interchangeably to give a more naturalistic feeling of hand lettering. Midway Ornaments features over 100 decorative border elements that can be combined is many ways for surprising and effective decorative motifs. Midway One and Midway Two have been remastered and now contain over 400 characters including support for Western and Central European languages.

An antique, hand-cut metal stencil for the Chicago-Burlington rail route stating “CB&Q RR – Private Property” inspired the sans serif stencil design Midwest Railway JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Another offbeat typeface inspired by the lettering on a design by Patrick Owsley for the Chicago Bears. There's nothing more lively than animated text, and Bear Club has that flavor in two ways. With counter inspirations drawn from fonts like Ad Lib and Nightclub, an automatic alternating caps and alternate caps feature, as well as a contextual alternates set that creates a true animated bounce, just like Hip Hopper. Let the fun begin with this spunky, lighthearted and heavy-weighted comic typeface.

Our notes say this was originated at the Barnhart Bros. & Spindler foundry in Chicago, and named Cable. Perhaps so, but we didn't find it in any of our BB&S catalogs. We made a few changes to improve the color.

This popular type was manufactured by the Crescent Type Foundry of Chicago and sold on their behalf by a half dozen other foundries. Introduced in the early 1890s, just as tastes were swinging away from the excesses of the Victorian period.

Hans Bacher created a comic styled caps only font with the movement of his bold lettering stylus.

The box cover of “Drawing Stencils No. 3 for Use on Slate or Paper” [a children’s drawing set produced by Montgomery, Ward & Company of Chicago circa the 1890s] had its title in an elegant spurred Roman type face. Working from the few letters available, a complete character set was created that resulted in Antique Packaging JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions. To note, this is the 1500th font release from Jeff Levine Fonts since its inception in January of 2006.

AdvertiserÆs Gothic Light, from a volume of headline fonts, was designed by Robert Wiebking in 1917. Wiebking was a skilled type engraver from Chicago who created his own pantographic machine, used to cut punches drawn by other successful type designers, including Frederic Goudy.

Handlettering in an ad from the 1920s for a Chicago engraving company provided the inspiration for this fine, fat, flowing face, full of fun and antique charm. Both versions of this font include the complete Unicode 1252 Latin and Unicode 1250 Central European character sets.

Bitstream Cooper was designed at Bitstream in 1986 by means of adding light, medium, and bold styles, with the corresponding italics, to the existing black ones. Based on Cooper Black, 1919, by Oswald Bruce Cooper, which was firstly released as a hand composition font in 1922 by Barnhart Brothers & Spindler of Chicago and later spread by ATF. Cooper Black is an extra bold face based on Cooper Old Style. Bitstream Cooper is an old style face with rounded serifs and tilted back ovals. For use both in text (normal weights) and in advertising and display typography (heavy weights). Cyrillic version was developed for ParaType in 2000 by Manvel Shmavonyan and based on TM Oswald face of TypeMarket, 1996, by Victoria Grigorenko.

A comprehensive set of initials (usually referred to as Uncials, Lombardic Initials, or Lombards) of the French variety, adapted from Bergling, J.M. (1918), Art Alphabets and Lettering (Second Edition), Chicago: Blakely-Oswald Printing Company. The font contains over one hundred glyphs, including character outlines for two-color layering. Suitable to accompany most Gothic (especially Textura and Rotunda) and many Roman typefaces, or to be displayed as drop caps or in full titles and headings. Specimen, detailed character map, OpenType features, and font samples available at Alter Littera’s The Initials “Bergling A” Font Page.

Sign Project JNL is based on vintage water-applied decals once made by the Meyercord Decal Company of Chicago (and later Carol Stream), Illinois. These decals were popular during the 1950s and 1960s for window signage, boat identification, mailbox names and numbers and hundreds of other projects.

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 Victorian age. Originally a caps-only font, we have added a lowercase to match.

Designed by Ernst Lauschke in 1888 and issued by Barnhart Bros. & Spindler foundry in Chicago under the name Dormer. It was revived in 1923 by the foundry with a new name, Pekin. We have "regularized" the face for modern use, but have included the changed characters as alternates.

In the early 1960s, the Duro Decal Company of Chicago, Illinois added to its line of water-applied decal lettering a retail sign cabinet of die-cut, pressure sensitive vinyl letters and numbers. Four of the six sizes offered for sale were cut from white plastic with a black outline and a secondary gold inline for a tri-color effect. Sign Stickers JNL emulates as closely as possible the look of these nostalgic pieces, complete with the slight shifts in line weight due to hand-cut silk screens and the printing process. For those of you who prefer to make your own multi-colored letters, a three piece fill font set is available for the low price of a single font purchase. Combine the backfill, midfill and frontfill layers for a truly retro look!

Before ink jet and laser printers; before copy machines, the main way to make multiples of anything not provided by printing press was by a mimeograph machine or spirit duplicator. The mimeograph utilized a porous drum which inked the backside of a waxed stencil sheet. Unlike traditional stencils which have cut out areas that are directly inked or painted, a mimeo stencil has the area to be printed scratched away by removing the wax coating with a stylus. The resulting image allows the ink from the drum to seep through the sheet and transfer to the blank paper. Based on a plastic lettering guide once manufactured by the A.B. Dick Company of Chicago, Mimeograph Template JNL is available in regular and oblique versions. Albert Blake Dick, the company’s founder, coined the term ‘mimeography’. The font’s character shapes follow the routed letters of the template, complete with rounded terminals. An earlier font release [designed with flat terminals and some alternate characters] is available as Interoffice Memo JNL.

NixonScript is a display typeface inspired by the typographic emancipation given voice by 1950s and '60s north American vernacular type. NixonScript's starting point was lettering found on a 1960s camera found in a Chicago junk shop, but its development saw it transformed from a punchy sans-serif to a more thoughtful serif, with a lowered x-height and a vibe of almost priestly piousness. Rather than a simple regular italic, a bold italic is offered. During its development, the regular version seemed almost placid but with the double emphasis of bold and italic, NixonScript gained an energetic, self-congratulatory form.

The font DXAngelusMediaval was developed on the basis of the Angelus Mediaval font, which was issued by Russian type foundry from the beginning of the 20th century (type foundry of G. Bertgold, St. Petersburg and Moscow, before 1904). Probably, the font is a reworking of the DeVinne font (1892 (?), Designer Nicholas J. Werner) of the American Central Type Foundry. For the reconstruction, we used examples of font prints: Cyrillic from the catalog "Art Fonts", 1929, Latin part - Chicago font, from the catalog "La Fonderie Typographique Francaise" (FTF) 1924. In addition, in the font are available Digits of the old style and ligature.

Soft Rock is a bold condensed sans serif with rounded contours that contrives to be gentle and dynamic at the same time: rather like the soft rock bands (Chicago, Air Supply, Fleetwood Mac etc) after which it is named. It's a warm, friendly font ideal for branding everything from soup to soft furnishings.

Paint Store JNL is the third in Jeff Levine's series of display fonts modeled from actual water-applied decals that were manufactured by the Duro Decal Company of Chicago (now Duro Art Industries). Duro Decals were sold in paint, hardware, variety and art supply stores, and even [in some cases] print shops.

@andinistas presents Rapsodia, an uncommon roman caps font with serif and high contrast, designed by #carlosfabiancg. Rapsodia was inspired by Stunt Roman, Speedball Textbook for Pen & Brush Lettering by Ross F. George. Rapsodia has a high and sweetened amount of contrast between thin and thick with drop-shaped finishes, reminiscent of Didot, Baskerville and Bodoni. Its artistic accent translates into Tuscan letters drawn with a flexible tip pen. In that order, Rapsodia combines the visual theatricality of an art nouveau corset, with creative historical classics such as Liza Minnelli, Gene Simmons and Freddie Mercury. Its calligraphic curlers full of Mannerist virtuosity are unnatural in Roman caps typefaces with serif. That is why its internal vein in ascending and descending flourishes protrudes with Chicano circus details like triangular diamonds located in vertical strokes. Rapsodia serves to design words and phrases in fine publications, for this reason most of its upper and lower case letters communicate feelings with classic and luxurious sensation through substitutes, ligatures and alternatives for beginning, middle or end of word, functioning as initials and terminals.