Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545081
8 2 P E R S P E C T I V E M AY / J U N E 2 0 2 6 Typefaces, Fonts and Agony Making our lives much more interesting was the studios' preferred font regime. For those who may not have had the pleasure, each studio mandates an ever-shifting web of rules that restrict which foundries or marketplaces all fonts may originate from, ostensibly for legal reasons (despite the fact that the US Copyright Office does not allow typefaces themselves to be copyrighted). The original directives on our show required us to limit ourselves to "system fonts," i.e., fonts that shipped with a computer operating system, and Adobe Originals, which is a small subset of one hundred and sixteen Adobe-designed fonts. In 1933, newspapers and nearly all printing was performed via lead-type presses, which means that actual small letters made of lead were arrayed in neat rows and pressed into ink, then to paper. Mac and Windows system fonts are unsurprisingly not made to look anything like lead-type letterforms, which came as unwelcome news to the producers. After telling them that it would be impossible to create the world of 1933 with those font restrictions, the studios' accommodation was to allow the department to purchase fonts from a site called FontSpring, which I'd never heard of. Thankfully, the internet gods have favored us with a bountiful resource, the Internet Archive, that is not only a deeply comprehensive wellspring (or font, if you will) of historical images and publications, but it gets better literally every day. The Archive hosts thousands of books, newspapers and type specimen books dating back to the earliest days of print, and many (though not all) are scanned in high-enough quality and resolution A. STEVEN SAMANEN DREW LETTERFORMS FROM SCRATCH AFTER PERIOD PHOTOS, AS SHOWN, TO CREATE THE PAINTED LETTERING ON THE PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR'S OFFICE DOOR GLASS. B. PERIOD FONTS CREATED BY STEVEN SAMANEN. WITH ACCESS TO COMMERCIAL FONTS SORELY RESTRICTED, HE REPRODUCED TYPEFACES FROM TYPE SPECIMEN BOOKS, MAGAZINES AND NEWSPAPERS FROM THE EARLY 1900S. A B