The mission of the Type Heritage Project is to discover and record the sources of digital fonts with 19th- to mid-20th-century origins—their legitimate tradename(s), the year, country and designer or foundry of origin. Volume One of a book series on this subject (in preparation) deals with 19th-century display faces. Research of this era, obstructed by nearly two centuries of renaming for good and not-so-good reasons, began c1996 by matching a Type-1 font called Parsnip with historical specimens called Art Gothic.

With few exceptions until the 1870s, metal and wood typefaces were un-named except to describe the measurement systems then in use, a vaguely defined style category and the cataloging system determined by the founder or vendor offering them for sale.

For example, an identical face originally sold as Two-Line Long Primer Ornamented No. 8 by one foundry and as Two-Line Small Pica Ornamented No. 12 by another is now known as Jim Crow and, thanks to photolettering and digital font technology, its original press-dependent size is irrelevant.

Many 19th-century type designers were freelancers who sold their drawings to foundries or wood-type manufacturers for production, so the client named it. In many cases, the client later sold (or granted limited rights to) the face to other foundries or vendors, which often renamed it.

To further complicate matters, typefaces were sometimes renamed for the purpose of re-introducing them as "new" after withdrawing them from sale for a time.

Pirates and Patents. As early as 1842, it became profitable for founders to reproduce the work of competitors with an electrotyping process invented in Russia three years earlier [Solo, 22-23]. To check this form of plagarism (called "piracy" even then), George Bruce (Bruce's New York Type-Foundry) persuaded the US Patent and Trademark Office to issue patents for type and other designs demonstrated as new.

The first design patent was issued to Mr. Bruce in 1842 for a body of existing type and ornamental fonts that he personally designed. Besides fonts, design patents are issued for every form of decorative art (ceramic/textile patterns, furniture, cigar boxes, etc.).

Except for the Bruce family, few type designers availed themselves of this intellectual property protection until 1863. Between then and 1900, virtually every type design originating in the US was patented [Solo, 26].

Likewise, many type and ornamental fonts designed abroad are registered in the US. While there is evidence of international piracy in the 19th century [Solo, personal communication 2007], fonts acquired by electrotyping theoretically were not submitted for US patent and the founders/vendors who sold them renamed them.

Design patents are issued only to designers, with or without a stated assignee (foundry, corporation or individual). The term of a design patent is 3.5, 7 or 14 years, depending on the registration fee selected by the applicant [Solo, personal communication 2007]. Once the patent expires, it is technically legal to copy the work.

Tradename Registration. It is important to note that font tradenames are legally unrelated to design patents; in fact, the intended name must be excluded from the application. As for logos and brand trademarks, tradename registration is a separate process with renewable expiration terms. So after the patent expires and the design of a font becomes public domain, the tradename associated with it may remain the permanent property of the owner of the original font or, in some cases, an entirely different font with the same name.

Standardization. By the late 1880s, many US foundries faced financial ruin because of competitive price wars. In 1892, they began to unite as American Type Founders [ATF]. One of ATF’s major early challenges was to tame the chaos of fonts pooled by merging foundries and to catalog all similar faces by the same tradename. Because the Point System for type measurement had been adopted by the US in 1886, this task was realistic for the first time.

Morris Fuller Benton. ATF charged Mr. Benton, who later became the most prolific type designer in history, with performing this miracle. After extensive research and analysis of letterform traits, he methodically organized the type family and series systems that may seem obvious today.

For example, he distinguished fieldmarks common to faces with thin, flat serifs and contrasting heavy/hairline strokes. He classified this group as "Bodonis" regardless of slant, width or weight [Lieberman, 59]. Even so, existing faces not offered by ATF escaped Benton’s efforts and ATF’s European imports were known elsewhere by other tradenames.

Demise of Metal Type. By the mid-20th century, use of wood type was rare and metal type was becoming progressively obsolete for all but letterpress specialty work. Mechanical photolettering and manual transfer type emerged and then dominated, especially for commercial artwork that, as always, demanded eye-catching display faces.

Metal typefoundries began to fail--selling their typecasting equipment, matrices and intellectual property to a diminishing number of survivors in the US and Europe. Surely records were lost or mis-interpreted in the process.

The Photolettering Revolution. During this transition, the type industry‘s top priority was to convert existing faces for use with the new technologies. Besides drawing innovative new faces, type designers of the day naturally explored the rich heritage of 19th-century fonts. Because the original design patents had expired long ago, copying them was legal.

When working with unidentified tangible type, ephemera, European or pre-ATF specimens, revivalists were often ignorant of the fonts‘ legitimate tradenames. Even when this information was available, many renamed them to avoid possible tradename infringement or, in the worst-case scenario, to claim the faces as their own creations.

Dan X. Solo. Beginning in 1942, Mr. Solo collected worldwide some 6,000 wood or metal fonts and printed specimens. For the next five decades, he converted about 5,000 of them to film for his photolettering service. When their tradenames were unidentified, later learned or conflicted with other faces in his library, he named or renamed them.

Between 1976 and 1998, he compiled 30 books of full-page named specimens, a comprehensive catalog of 4,000+ named text specimens and countless volumes of camera-ready alphabets and clipart. After retirement, he switched to digital font formats, produced 13 book/CDrom combinations with named fonts and continued digitizing his vast trove of specimens as the Solotype Archive, which documents his knowledge of each font's history. Because of Mr. Solo's authoritative and extremely influential work, an untold number of revival typefaces are known today by the names he gave them.

The Digital Revolution. Beginning c1990 with introduction of scalable Type-1 and TrueType fonts, history repeated itself. This time, many specimens were drawn from photolettering and transfer-type catalogs. The final irony is that even the most ethical digitizers sometimes mistakenly credit the design of a face to the previous generation of revivalists and cite the tradenames assigned by them--never suspecting that some of these faces were already 100+ years old when re-popularized during the 1960s and 1970s.