This roly-poly romp through the alphabets is based on a showing from Carl Holmes' 1950s book, ABC of Lettering, published by art-for-the-masses magnate Walter T. Foster. Named as an apt companion to my East Coast Frolics.

DIN Text Universal is the most advanced DIN superfamily ever. It combines the powerful DIN Text Pro with DIN Text Arabic bringing the number of glyphs to 3320 per font. In fact, this set of fonts contains the most complete and powerful array of arabic features commercially available. It supports all variations of the Arabic script such as Persian, Urdu and Pashto. It is also enhanced with 30 advanced opentype features and kerning for all languages. The four major scripts Latin, Arabic, Cyrillic and Greek are now matched across the design of the whole family, respecting at the same time each one's modern cultural identity. With its vast array of weights, the extended support for numerous languages, its careful and detailed design, it will prove to be extremely valuable for many complex corporate projects and corporations which operate internationally.

British type designer Chris Burke created this serif FontFont in 1994. The family contains 4 weights: Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic and is ideally suited for editorial and publishing and small text. FF Celeste Small Text provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, small capitals, alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, fractions, and super- and subscript characters. It comes with a complete range of figure set options – oldstyle and lining figures, each in tabular and proportional widths. This FontFont is a member of the FF Celeste super family, which also includes FF Celeste and FF Celeste Sans.

The original metal Neue Haas Grotesk™ would, in the late 1950s become Helvetica®. But, over the years, Helvetica would move away from its roots. Some of the features that made Neue Haas Grotesk so good were expunged or altered owing to comprimises dictated by technological changes. Christian Schwartz says Neue Haas Grotesk was originally produced for typesetting by hand in a range of sizes from 5 to 72 points, but digital Helvetica has always been one-size-fits-all, which leads to unfortunate compromises."""" Schwartz's digital revival sets the record straight, so to speak. What was lost in Neue Haas Grotesk's transition to the digital Helvetica of today, has been resurrected in this faithful digital revival. The Regular and Bold weights of Helvetica were redesigned for the Linotype machine; those alterations remained when Helvetica was adapted for phototypesetting. During the 1980s, the family was redrawn and released as Neue Helvetica. Schwartz's revival of the original Helvetica, his new Neue Haas Grotesk, comes complete with a number of Max Miedinger's alternates, including a flat-legged R. Eight display weights, from Thin to Black, plus a further three weights drawn specifically for text make this much more than a revival - it's a versatile, well-drawn grot with all the right ingredients. The Thin weight (originally requested by Bloomberg Businessweek) is very fine, very thin indeed, and reveals the true skeleton of these iconic letterforms. Available as a family of OpenType fonts with a very large Pro character set, Neue Haas Grotesk supports most Central European and many Eastern European languages.

Blackletter typeface.

Howdy pardner! Giddy-up and lasso yerself these renegade typefaces. Created by renowned illustrator David Lyttleton , this set presents an Englishman's unique vision of the American West. Perfect for your next hoe-down, barn raising or Western-themed cricket match.

The design of Futura seems to be timeless. This typeface family which had been developed in 1926 by Paul Renner for the Bauer Type Foundry in the style of constructivism and as part of the Bauhaus movement, experienced, however, in the course of the past 90 years, repeated time-appropriate revivals which guaranteed its on-going popularity. The version of the Futura EF Pro contains the original character constructions which Dennis Megaw described as the “first designs of Futura” in 1938 in “20th century sans serif types, Typography no. 7” (See: Dr. Christopher Burke: Paul Renner, Princeton Architectural Press, New York 1998). What makes it exceptional is the extension into three weights: “Text”, “Headline” and “Index” which came about as part of a degree dissertation at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HFBK) in Hamburg. In this context, the accompanying documentation “Die Kritik der reinen Futura” (“The Critique of the Pure Futura”) by Katharina Strauer was published by the Materialverlag, Hamburg, in 2003. Some copies are still available at Elsner+Flake.

Old English is a digital font that was produced by Monotype's design staff, circa 1990. But its roots go much further back: the face's design is based on that of Caslon Black, a Blackletter type cast by the venerable William Caslon foundry in England, circa 1760. This design has been popular throughout England for centuries. Its style of lettering, conveniently also called Old English, can be found all over the UK. Old English-style typefaces belong to the Blackletter category. They nicely combine the design attributes of both the medieval and Victorian eras. This is mostly because their Textura forms, which were born during the Middle Ages, became quite fashionable again in the late 1800s! This Old English font is very legible for a Blackletter face. Perhaps that is why it is more familiar to readers in the UK and North American than German Blackletter varieties, like Fraktur. A favorite once again today, Old English is ideal for certificates, diplomas, or any application which calls for the look of stateliness and authority. It's a sturdy and sure bet for newspaper banners, holiday greeting cards, and wedding announcements.

These Oksana Text Swash Cyrillic fonts have swashed initials and ampersand for Oksana Text italics in six weights from Thin to Black. They support basic Latin and European Cyrillic. For all-in-one fonts please look at that OpenType version of Oksana Text.

German type designers Verena Gerlach and Ole Schäfer created this sans FontFont in 2000. The family contains 4 weights and is ideally suited for editorial and publishing, poster and billboards as well as wayfinding and signage. FF CST Berlin West provides advanced typographical support with features such as alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, and stylistic alternates. It comes with proportional lining and tabular lining figures. This FontFont is a member of the FF creative industriesty Street Type super family, which also includes FF CST Berlin East.

Italian type designer Albert Pinggera created this sans FontFont between 1996 and 1998. The family has 6 weights, ranging from Light to Bold (including italics) and is ideally suited for advertising and packaging, editorial and publishing, logo, branding and creative industries, software and gaming as well as sports. FF Letter Gothic Text provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, fractions, super- and subscript characters, and stylistic alternates. It comes with a complete range of figure set options – oldstyle and lining figures, each in tabular and proportional widths. This FontFont is a member of the FF Letter Gothic super family, which also includes FF Letter Gothic Mono and FF Letter Gothic Slang.

A late nineteenth-century type specimen catalog from Farmer, Little & Co. yielded this droll little typeface, originally called "Arbor". The distinctive decorations of the face suggested a fool's cap, and thus the font got its current name. And don't call me Surely.

Sheet music for a song featured in "East to West", a film starring Mexican bombshell Dolores Del Rio, had the movie's name lettered in a bold sans style with early Art Deco influences. East to West JNL preserves not only the name, but all of the characteristics of this wonderful bit of typographic nostalgia.

Modeled on the writings chiseled in stone in the second century B.C., Syntax™ Lapidar is an energetic, spirited typeface designed by Hans Eduard Meier in 2000. Linotype Syntax Lapidar Text and Linotype Syntax Lapidar Serif Text have five weights each, with both cap and lowercase letterforms. Lapidar Display and Lapidar Serif Display also have five weights each, with mostly all cap letterforms and many alternates. It's a terrifically fun and inventive family, and if you look closely, you can see the resemblance to the more modern and restrained Syntax™ relatives. Great for menus, artist books, travelogues, or advertising - and if used very sparingly, it could add just the right element of lapidary significance to corporate documents.

A WPA poster announcing the latest production by—guess who?—the Big Tent Players inspired this eye-catching, if somewhat unconventional, typeface. Both versions of the font include the 1252 Latin and 1250 CE character sets (with localization for Romanian and Moldovan).

Eckhardt Poster Text JNL continues Jeff Levine's series of sign painter-oriented fonts, named in honor of his good friend Albert Eckhardt, Jr. (who ran Allied signs in Miami, Florida from 1959 until his passing). Sign painters are the true heroes of lettering, for they make the alphabet and style fit the job. Printers and layout artists were constricted by metal and wood type; that is until photo lettering, then digital type opened up unexplored territories in design possibilities. There is a unique charm (and nowadays pretty much a lost art) to hand-lettering word copy in a way that draws the eye like an arrow to a target. Even a simple sanserif such as Eckhardt Poster Text JNL can have the effect of that hand lettering when applied to posters and pages with plenty of white space and matching type designs of the period.

This Arabic typeface is one of Parachute’s most involved text typefaces. For the first time -back in 2010- a contemporary Arabic equivalent to a comprehensive DIN series of fonts was available. In fact, this set of fonts contains the most complete and powerful array of Arabic features commercially today. It comes in eight weights and includes Latin. Based on the DIN Text Pro superfamily, Parachute® released -in collaboration with designer Hasan Abu Afash- 2 new versions. DIN Text Arabic is the basic Arabic version which includes Latin and supports all variations of the Arabic script such as Persian, Urdu and Pashto. The second version DIN Text Universal is the most advanced DIN superfamily ever. It combines the powerful DIN Text Pro with DIN Text Arabic bringing the number of glyphs to 3320 per font. It is also enhanced with 30 advanced opentype features and kerning for all languages. Altogether it supports hundreds of languages, proving to be an essential tool for corporations which operate internationally. The whole family consists of eight weights from extra black to hairline. DIN Text Arabic is featured in the recent book Arabesque 2 by Gestalten.

Modeled on the writings chiseled in stone in the second century B.C., Syntax™ Lapidar is an energetic, spirited typeface designed by Hans Eduard Meier in 2000. Linotype Syntax Lapidar Text and Linotype Syntax Lapidar Serif Text have five weights each, with both cap and lowercase letterforms. Lapidar Display and Lapidar Serif Display also have five weights each, with mostly all cap letterforms and many alternates. It's a terrifically fun and inventive family, and if you look closely, you can see the resemblance to the more modern and restrained Syntax™ relatives. Great for menus, artist books, travelogues, or advertising - and if used very sparingly, it could add just the right element of lapidary significance to corporate documents.

The new font “The Best We Could Do” was created by artist and author Thi Bui who used the font in the graphic novel by the same name. The font is brush-script handwriting font which displays human personality rendered with bold confident strokes full of passion and expression. Chank’s work on this font captured Bui’s distinctive textual style and also saved her a ton of headache and time in inking. A debut memoir that tells the story of one family’s journey from their war-torn home in Vietnam in the 1970s to their new lives in America, the autobiographical book is lauded for its heart-breaking exploration of identity, family, and home. Bui ties her modern life with the multi-generational experiences of her family, weaving together the emotional threads of their relationships to find clarity in her current day. “The Best We Could Do” graphic novel is published by Abrams ComicArts and is available wherever fine books are sold.

In 1931, The Times of London commissioned a new text type design from Stanley Morison and the Monotype Corporation, after Morison had written an article criticizing The Times for being badly printed and typographically behind the times. The new design was supervised by Stanley Morison and drawn by Victor Lardent, an artist from the advertising department of The Times. Morison used an older typeface, Plantin, as the basis for his design, but made revisions for legibility and economy of space (always important concerns for newspapers). As the old type used by the newspaper had been called Times Old Roman," Morison's revision became "Times New Roman." The Times of London debuted the new typeface in October 1932, and after one year the design was released for commercial sale. The Linotype version, called simply "Times," was optimized for line-casting technology, though the differences in the basic design are subtle. The typeface was very successful for the Times of London, which used a higher grade of newsprint than most newspapers. The better, whiter paper enhanced the new typeface's high degree of contrast and sharp serifs, and created a sparkling, modern look. In 1972, Walter Tracy designed Times Europa for The Times of London. This was a sturdier version, and it was needed to hold up to the newest demands of newspaper printing: faster presses and cheaper paper. In the United States, the Times font family has enjoyed popularity as a magazine and book type since the 1940s. Times continues to be very popular around the world because of its versatility and readability. And because it is a standard font on most computers and digital printers, it has become universally familiar as the office workhorse. Times?, Times? Europa, and Times New Roman? are sure bets for proposals, annual reports, office correspondence, magazines, and newspapers. Linotype offers many versions of this font: Times? is the universal version of Times, used formerly as the matrices for the Linotype hot metal line-casting machines. The basic four weights of roman, italic, bold and bold italic are standard fonts on most printers. There are also small caps, Old style Figures, phonetic characters, and Central European characters. Times? Ten is the version specially designed for smaller text (12 point and below); its characters are wider and the hairlines are a little stronger. Times Ten has many weights for Latin typography, as well as several weights for Central European, Cyrillic, and Greek typesetting. Times? Eighteen is the headline version, ideal for point sizes of 18 and larger. The characters are subtly condensed and the hairlines are finer."