The thin, condensed serif lettering found in a 1937 magazine ad for Chris Craft boats inspired Formal Invite JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Patent Reclame manages to be light-hearted, while clearly showing its blackletter roots both in the shape of the individual letters and the rhythm of text on a page. The designer is unknown. Schriftgeisserei Flinsch of Frankfurt a.M. cast the face around 1895. Nicolete Gray shows a quite similar face called “Graphic,” from Stephenson Blake in 1896. Personally, I don't think that Patent Reclame looks like an English design, but I do not have any proof one way or the other. The numbers are proportional, intended for posters, not spreadsheets. Two ornaments are included, an art nouveau rose at #172 and a lilypad with long tendril at #177. Great for invitations, posters and flyers announcing fun events. Do not use for obituaries. Quite readable in smaller sizes for short blocks of text. I really like the buoyant quality -- a nice combination of discipline and enthusiasm.

This font family is inspired by printed work made by the Elzevir family back in the XVIIth century at Leiden (NL). They worked with material from several type designers, but further investigations sends us to the tracks of one in particular: Robert Granjon. Granjon italics were way ahead of his time, making some really beautiful signs like swashy ampersands and minuscule v letters. This font also contains old style figures in the same fashion as they were printed, like the flipped number 8 and open forms in 6 and 9. This is as much a revival as an original design, because of their weights bold and heavy (both with italics) that were inspired on some titles. In this font you can also find a lot of ligatures, small caps, diacritics and even a fleuron for each weight and variation. Leidener came up from two books: Constantini Imperiatoris (1611) and Exercitationum Mathematicarum (1657), printed by Louis and John Elzevir on their Leiden Workshop, back in the day.