What is this awesome old decorative font?

May 28, 2014 10:41 AM

What is this awesome old poster font? I am absolutely certain that I've seen this font available today, but I don't remember where. No dice on either Identifont or What The Font - Can Mefi help?
posted by 235w103 to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

You are probably thinking of Playbill, which ships with MS Office.
posted by fontophilic at 10:58 AM on May 28, 2014

It seems to be a variant of Clarendon.
posted by brentajones at 11:02 AM on May 28, 2014

The font also bears more than a passing resemblance to the typeface from the old Thunderbirds TV series logo. I found a free version of the Thunderbirds font posted here. It's a little chunkier than the sample you posted, but it might work.
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:05 AM on May 28, 2014

The closest font I've found thus far is Bootspur Regular, which is almost identical for many of the glyphs, but lacks serifs for some of the vowels. Bootspur Regular seems young and was probably inspired by the mysterious original font, and then modified. The A and E are different, for instance.

Depending on how badly you want to know the answer to this question, I'm pretty sure the sheet you linked to is from a Dutch art magazine published circa 1953 (I checked at my U's library and we don't have it). Here's the cover. The Art Magazine was broken up into 5 parts and the section you referenced is page 32 of Part 3: Fancy Fonts. What I believe to be the original publisher, Uitgeverij Arti (Arti Publishers according to Google Translate), is based in Alkmaar in the Netherlands and appears still to be in business.

Maybe there are MeFites who live in Alkmaar...
posted by tempestuoso at 1:10 PM on May 28, 2014 [1 favorite]

It certainly looks like some kind of a Clarendon. Most similar maybe to this Belgian (not an exact match) from this page of Clarendons? The French Clarendons are also worth investigating.
posted by hollyholly at 1:19 PM on May 28, 2014