This past week in the Baylor University Libraries Book Arts & Letterpress Lab we uncovered a really beautiful font specimen that was part of a gift to the lab hiding in the shadows of a type with its roommate, the big, bold, bossy Cooper Black font. Our intern Mary Grace got to work identifying this lovely and mysterious, elongated font with a hint of modernity using an online font identification tool (http://www.identifont.com/) and landed on Binner Gothic as our mystery font. It was clearly a match though there were a few variations that didn’t match up. We shared this find on the @baylorbookarts instagram account and one of our followers, @siennajewisharts, had this to say: “I think it is BG! It’s so distinctive. The font specimen that Mary is holding is from the *digitized* version of BG which has some subtle differences from the original type forms! Compare the crossbar of the “f,” for example, which is much higher in the original Bruce foundry specimen than in the digital version and pointed us to the 1901 type specimen book by the Bruce Foundry of New York that was established in 1813. This type specimen book belongs to the University of Michigan and was digitized and included in HathiTrust Digital Library (a collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries). Access to the digitized type specimen book here.
So thanks to University of Michigan for scanning this specimen book, to HathiTrust for providing access, to the IdentiFont website for helping us identify the font and to instagram for providing a community of people interested in pre-internet stuff who are willing to share their expertise!
