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The hardest working font in Manhattan
A story of a 150-year-old font you have never heard of – and one you probably saw earlier today.
I admired American Typewriter in all of the I <3 NYC logos, watched Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica fighting over the subway signs, and even caught an occasional appearance of the flawlessly-named Gotham, still a year before it skyrocketed in popularity via Barack Obama’s first campaign. This was Gorton abstracted away – still a pantograph, but cheap, small, completely manual, and a vastly simplified one: no possibility to make things bigger and smaller, and no carving – instead, you’d mount a special pen and draw letters by tracing them. A Taylor-Hobson pantograph in use in 1942 This adds to the accomplishments of Gorton – the font was actually older than even Akzidenz-Grotesk, and has been used on World War II equipment and later on on British rifles and motorcycles (and 3,775 finger posts in one of the UK’s national parks), but it complicates the story of the name even more.
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