Working at American Type Founders from a Bruce Foundry recutting, Morris Fuller Benton worked out the dramatics of the English Fat Face, and in 1928 produced Ultra Bodoni, a headline spectacular. Using Benton’s 1933 Ultra Bodoni Extra Condensed, Richard Lipton digitized Bodoni FB Bold Condensed, then took compression even further and designed Bodoni FB Bold Compressed, a real technical tour de force; FB 1992

A type foundry example showcasing some letters from a narrow slab serif wood type design served as the inspiration for Wood Serif Poster JNL. This condensed typeface is available in both regular and oblique versions, and digitally recreates the kind of lettering found on flyers, broadsides and newspaper headlines of the mid-to-late 1800s.

Estonia Regular is based on the calligraphic style found in the east European country of Estonia. The swash versions are designed to be used in conjunction with the regular version. For the full character set all in one font, try Estonia Nouveau Pro.

This was a favorite of the old time job printers;­ decorative but readable. The MacKellar foundry was the largest and most creative of the old foundries, and decorative fonts like this one came out at the rate of several every year.

The pattern for this font was found in the 1906 specimen book for the Keystone Type Foundry under the name Ancient Gothic, which is a pretty accurate description of the particular appeal of this typeface. Use it liberally anytime you want to add an air of mystery or menace...or simply some quaint charm. Both versions of the font include complete Latin 1252, Central European 1250 and Turkish 1524 character sets, with localization for Moldovan, Romanian and Turkish.

Adam Roe founded in 1991 Lunchbox Studios as an experiment. Adam is also president and founder of his second company Reelhouse Footage und FK in Los Angeles, California.

This stylish stout script was originally issued in the 1930s under the name “Fulgor” by the spanish foundry Fundición Gans. Cursory research suggests that Saks-Fifth Avenue found it suitably snooty to use extensively in its newspaper ads of that period. Perhaps somewhat ironically, this version takes its name from one of comedian W. C. Fields' many odd aliases.

Linotext was designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1901 and first appeared with the name Wedding Text with American Type Founders in Jersey City, where its metal forms were cut by hand. The font was so popular that its forms soon began appearing with other font foundries under different names, Elite Kanzlei with D. Stempel AG, Comtesse with C.F. Rühl, etc. Its ornamental forms are not considered very legible by today’s standards and Linotext should therefore be used for headlines and short texts in point sizes 12 or larger.