Bill Rigney, an old job printer in my home town, established his shop in 1896, closed it in 1900 to take a steady job, stored the equipment in a large shed, and reopened for business upon his retirement in 1950. What a find! A bonanza of old type! We became good friends and upon his death I bought the type. Bless you Bill.

Hand lettering on the packaging for an Arrow "Commander" Staple Remover seen in an online auction is the inspiration for the unusual and angular typeface comprising Staple Remover JNL. The Art Deco era of the 1930s and 1940s offers many wonderful examples of stylized and experimental lettering, and this, by far is one of the more eclectic styles of the time.

This bouncy little number is based on handlettering often found on greeting cards in the 1950s and 1960s, and often the work of Alan Denney. Wild and wacky (and maybe a little bit tacky), this monocase font is a sure attention-getter. This font contains the complete Latin language character set (Unicode 1252) plus support for Central European (Unicode 1250) languages as well.

This exuberant face was suggested by a piece of French sheet music from the 1930s for the song Sur un Air de Shimmy, The name comes from an Australian song from the 1950s about a noncompliant boomerang. Both versions of this font contain the Unicode 1252 (Latin) and Unicode 1250 (Central European) character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.

The Dollfus Mieg Company was founded in 1800 by Daniel Dollfus (1769-1818) and Anne-Marie Mieg (1770-1852). In the 1890s and again in 1901 it published Monograms and Alphabets for Combination, a book with alphabets and monograms for cross-stitching. This book served as example for several digital fonts by Paulo W. Here you can get one of them,

The unusually-shaped hand lettering of Penny Wise JNL was modeled from the cover of the 1936 sheet music for "You Dropped Me Like a Red Hot Penny", and is available in both regular and oblique versions. Although it was drawn during the Art Deco period, this type of lettering design style was revived during the Hippie movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

At the apex of the 1960s-70s Hippie movement, San Franscisco's Haight-Ashbury district was the epicenter of the Love Generation, and the Fillmore (East and West) were the city's musical venues. Inspired by a 1970 concert poster, the Art Nouveau influence was strongly felt in the hand lettering from that poster, which is the basis for Flower Children JNL.

A playful, casual take on round nib pen lettering was spotted amongst some online scans from an old lettering book. The free-form and stylized shapes of the letters and numbers are reminiscent of old-time show cards, movie titles and signage in vogue around the early 1900s through the 1920s. Fancy Show Card JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Grafiker means 'Graphic Designer' in German. This fat, colored, uneven font with a 1001 uses was loosely based on the work of designers Oskar Kokoschka (1886 - 1980) and Jean Carlu (1900 - 1997). The glyphs were hand-drawn with a 0.5 roller ball and colored in with Chinese ink, using a stiff brush. The result is a lively, rather unusual font.

Neuzeit Grotesk was originally designed by Wilhelm Pischner (1904-1989) and was released by the font foundry D. Stempel in 1928-1939. In 1970, the German Standards Committee advised the standard use of Neuzeit-Grotesk for official signage and traffic directional systems, and the abbreviation DIN was added to the name of the font. DIN" stands for Deutsches Institut für Normung (The German Institute for Industrial Standards). Neuzeit Grotesk was also once the standard in the German printing industry. It has been seen as a straightforward and utilitarian typeface, with no unusual or distracting features. Like other typefaces from the 1920s, it reflects the philosophy of those times, "Form is Function." Today, however, because of its familiarity and practicality, Neuzeit™ Grotesk has acquired an almost cheerful and reassuring aura. Try it out for signage, magazine headlines, or flyers. See also Neuzeit S for text weights of Neuzeit Grotesk.

Unique and decorative signage for many drive-ins, motels, food stores and other businesses of the 1940s had what was referred to as “privilege signs” provided by one of the major cola brands. Consisting of the brand’s emblem on a decorative panel, the remainder of the sign would carry the desired message of the storekeeper (such as “Drive-In”) in prismatic, embossed metal letters. Inspired by the Art Deco sans serif style of those vintage signs, Privilege Sign Two JNL recreates the type design in both regular and oblique versions. The typefaces are solid black, but adding a selected color and a prismatic effect from your favorite graphics program can reproduce the look and feel of those old businesses. This is a companion font to Privilege Sign JNL, which recreates the condensed sans serif lettering of other privilege signs from the 1950s and early 1960s.

The Journal Sans typeface was developed in the Type Design Department of SPA of Printing Machinery in Moscow in 1940–1956 by the group of designers under Anatoly Schukin. It was based on Erbar Grotesk by Jacob Erbar and Metro Sans by William A. Dwiggins, the geometric sans-serifs of the 1920s with the pronounced industrial spirit. Journal Sans, Rublenaya (Sans-Serif), and Textbook typefaces were the main Soviet sans-serifs. So no wonder that it was digitized quite early, in the first half of 1990s. Until recently, Journal Sans consisted of three faces and retained all the problems of early digitization, such as inaccurate curves or side-bearings copied straight from metal-type version. The years of 2013 and 2014 made «irregular» geometric sans-serifs trendy, and that fact affected Journal Sans. In the old version curves were corrected and the character set was expanded by Olexa Volochay. In the new release, besides minor improvements, a substantial work has been carried out to make the old typeface work better in digital typography and contemporary design practice. Maria Selezeneva significantly worked over the design of some glyphs, expanded the character set, added some alternatives, completely changed the side-bearings and kerning. Also, the Journal Sans New has several new faces, such as true italic (the older font had slanted version for the italic), an Inline face based on the Bold, and the Display face with proportions close to the original Erbar Grotesk. The new version of Journal Sans, while keeping all peculiarities and the industrial spirit of 1920s-1950s, is indeed fully adapted to the modern digital reality. It can be useful either for bringing historical spirit into design or for modern and trendy typography, both in print and on screen. Designed by Maria Selezeneva with the participation of Alexandra Korolkova. Released by ParaType in 2014.

Shtozer is a retro-themed display typeface based on designs of 1960s and 1970s and additionally inspired by Cyrillic ornate lettering Vyaz. It comes in 8 weights, with 5 width variations each, all accompanied with respective obliques - making 80 styles altogether. Shtozer is a font family with extensive language coverage including Cyrillic script. It also contains numerous OpenType features and alternate glyphs to vivify the typesetting.

Honest draws inspiration from the serif fonts prevalent in print media during the 1970s and 1980s. Its letter shapes are well-suited for prominent uses like logos and striking headlines due to their distinctive style. The font's large x-height makes it suitable for tight leading in headlines. Honest offers a variety of options, including seven different weights and two styles: Standard and Italic.

Roadstar is a script designed in the style of the classic American advertising font from the 1940's-1950's. Roadstar is a retro brush-style script designed for logotype, packaging, posters, T-shirts, signage & design projects with a retro & vintage feel. Roadstar comes with two styles that both contain all upper and lower case characters, punctuation, numerals and mathematical operators, as well as all accented characters.

Here's a lettering style that just might be exactly on your wavelength. Add just the right dose of vintage freak-a-delia to your retro graphics with this original psychedelic-style design. Great for music posters, album graphics, book titles, etc. Evoke a warpy, wavy, whimsical vibe that harks back to the carefree 1960s or early 1970s era with Sixties Flashback; it's pure hippie, trippy fun!

From alphabets created for book illustrations in the 1970s to lettering created for a book jacket in the 1990s, the Mentor family of typefaces has developed along its own slow and circuitous path. Always present in its evolution, though, has been the influence of three 20th century design giants: Eric Gill, Reynolds Stone, and Hermann Zapf, as filtered through the meticulous sensibility of Michael Harvey.

Although less prevalent today, a cover charge was added to better class night clubs of the 1930s and 1940s to discourage patronage by people of questionable social graces. The general idea was that the lower strata of society (meaning the "average Joe" or "hoi polloi") would balk at paying an extra fee just for entrance to a place of good entertainment and fine dining.

For decades, spot illustrations - whether by hot type, photoengraving, clip art or (in later years) digital means provided decorative and often lighthearted breaks in reading printed copy. This collection of twenty-six cartoon images has been meticulously re-drawn in digital format from 1920s-1930s era source material. By adding a simple caption underneath a design, your ad copy can be enhanced with these wonderful period pieces.

Mayak is a geometric sans serif inspired by the Soviet constructivist fonts of the 1920s-1930s. It contains traditional upper and lower case characters as well as small caps and a great number of stylistic alternates. The font comes in 12 styles: 4 weights in 3 widths. Mayak was designed by Yana Nosenko with contributions from Dmitry Kirsanov and released by ParaType in 2017.

I believe it was Picasso who had a Blue Period between 1901 and 1904. It seems that I have one myself - really not comparing myself to Picasso btw… Recently I created Blue Sheep font and now this one: Little Boy Blue. Little Boy Blue is a very legible, easy-on-the-eye font for texts, books, covers and packaging. Comes with 50 shades of diacritics.

Balcony Seats JNL is a different take on Jeff Levine's Aisle Seats JNL. The original font was modeled from Redikut die-cut cardboard letters - used in the 1940's and 1950's for display and show card work). Although the basic letter shapes are similar, the horizontal stroke weights have been narrowed, providing a type variation with a classic Art Deco "thick and thin" look.

This typeface is inspired from the old display fonts that used to decorate the world around us, but just because we don't see such beautiful signage these days, doesn't mean we should lose the great typefaces used. Foreman is a condensed serif display typeface, with hard geometric lines inspired from fonts used in the 1930s and 1940s, and very much used by the American Art Deco movement.

Neue Rinjani is a all-caps sans serif with Wide Stretch contemporary typographic, vintage futuristic art-deco touch Streamline influence of the 1930s and 1940s. A mix from the old Euro-American signage/advertising letters and modern clean sans serif, carefully mousecrafted to bring you the genuine feel of the era. If you're into classic/vintage letter designs, then this typeface suits best for you.

The hand lettering found on a small catalog sheet for decorative decals from the 1930s-1940s era was the perfect source material for Crestview Six JNL. Handmade typefaces or signage from past decades offer a wonderfully humanistic change from the perfectly-crafted designs of printer's type (or digital type in the modern era). The font's name comes from the old alpha-numerical phone exchanges of the past.

This big family summarizes and develops the tradition of boldface squared-off 45° shear sanserifs. Known from the middle of 19th century and actively used in different times (1920s, 1970s) is still usable now, thanks to its brutal expression, monumentality and possibility to fully maximize the flatness without loss of readability. This font is especially good for filling letters with photos or to create geometrical “constructivist” compositions.

Originally presented as an alphabet suitable for movie title cards, this font is based on a 1920 work by showcard artist E. C. Matthews, and named after the eponymous 1940s radio show about a local saloon and its never-present owner. Both versions of this font contain the Unicode 1252 (Latin) and Unicode 1250 (Central European) character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.

Liturgisch was created by Otto Hupp for Klingspor foundry in 1906. The basis of this font is a publication in the magazine "Das Plakat" of October 1921. The font contains contextual alternates, ligatures, discretional ligatures for use in German, ornamental bullets and other OpenType features. It supports all the European languages using Latin alphabets (including slashed S and slashed longs used in Latvian old orthography till 1930s).

Karaoke JNL is one of the many alphabets created by the late Alf R. Becker that was showcased in Signs of the Times magazine from the 1930s through the 1950s. Thanks to Tod Swormstedt of ST Media (and who is the curator of the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio) for providing Jeff Levine the research material from which this font design was modeled.

With all of the stencil fonts created by Jeff Levine from various vintage sources, you would think everything had already been covered. Not so. Along comes Amateur Stencil JNL. Modeled from a child's stencil set from the late 1950's or early 1960's, it vaguely resembles Futura, but its irregular widths and semi-stencil appearance sets it off greatly from that classic typeface.

General Chang JNL is one of a number of fonts redrawn by Jeff Levine from the creative output of the late Alf R. Becker. Becker's alphabets were a monthly feature of Signs of the Times Magazine from the 1930s through the 1950s. Thanks to Tod Swormstedt of ST Media (who also is the curator of the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio) for the resource material.

Carnaby Street is a vintage style bold font that pairs strong rectangular framing with softer rounded elements. It has a cool, funky, and groovy vibe, while still retaining a strong sense of linearity and geometry. This lettering style conjures up the retro vibes of the 1960s swinging London scene, or the psychedelic poster art of posters and handbills for the Fillmore Auditorium and Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco in the mid to late '60s. It represents a new take on a classic array of hand lettered stylings that have their roots both in the Art Nouveau Movement and the hippie counterculture movement of the 1960s and early 1970s.

For many decades, the fashion magazine “Vogue” featured superbly illustrated covers before photography became more commonplace. During the 1930s and 1940s those illustrations were accompanied by many creative styles of hand lettering for its monthly issues. The January, 1930 cover had the magazine’s name lettered in an Art Deco geometric monoline, which became the inspiration for Vagary JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions. A vagary [in a simple sense] is when something or someone changes in an erratic or unexpected way (as the wind’s direction or in a person’s mood or whim)… and thus seemed the fitting name for this type style.