Monotype font identification needed

[John Nixon]

Hi all:
Amongst the fonts we were sorting are in the attached pic.
Appears to be a 10 point Caps only Titling Font.
Can anyone identify please.
Thanks, John

[David Bolton]

If the two mats shown on their side are part of the set, then it is Modern Extended series 7 in 10 point and 280 is the serial number of the special letter punched for it. Each special letter should have a serial number, so there could be a 280A and a 123B, or even a 280B, etc.

Were the Type Archive still open, one could look up the serial number on the Kardex records, and see what faces it had been punched for. Though in this case it is 7/10. Hopefully the Kardex records will become accessible again once the Science Museum has unwrapped the cabinet, in its hanger store at Wroughton near Swindon.

The matrix charts, also at Wroughton, would show, for series 7 in 10pt, all the special letters that had been punched, whether or not the letter had a serial number. If all the mats are stamped 7-10 then I guess they are fancy italic caps. In passing, for example, the letter A in 327/10 has some 140 different numbered versions...

David Bolton
The Alembic Press

[John Nixon]

Hi David

Thanks for the prompt reply.
We have discovered 61 more boxes of supercaster mats in Australia. Hopefully the missing ones from the Australian Monotype collection.

Happy sorting times.

[Dave Hughes]

We have discovered 61 more boxes of supercaster mats in Australia.

Don't forget where to come if you need more mats identifying John 

[Stafford]

Oddly I thought that the actual characters look rather like Monotype Palace Script series 429,  Series 280 is of course Tamil, and it doesn't look like that at all!

[Dave Hughes]

Thanks for your input Stafford.

I did a quick Google search for Monotype Modern Extended and came up with this:



I've got to agree that the mats pictured look more like Palace Script.

[Carsten Jegminat]

Fonts in Use: Palace Script

International index of hot metal typefaces, Compiled by Hans Reichardt:
Index of Typefaces

[Albion49]

It's definitely one of the scripts, but Monotype Palace Script (Series 429) differs from that shown in subtle details.

[Geoff Quadland]

It seems to me unlikely that it would be a caps only titling font because according to the guidelines of typography, formal scripts like that are never supposed to be set in all caps. An all cap line like that would have very low legibility.

[stafford]

As I recall Palace Script 429 needed both a very unusual mould AND the 'Reverse Delivery Attachment' a set up I believe was also used for Arabic. Very uncommon bits of kit, I'm slightly surprised that Australia had such stuff (No offence intended).

A couple of the UK trade houses certainly had them,  Yendalls at Risca and Mouldtype at Preston for example.

Prestons I think may have gone to Japan with all the rest of their stuff,  Yendalls?  goodness only knows.

[stafford]

Hi, @John Nixon - I'd dearly like to see a list of those Supercaster mats you have found.  Wether here
in the UK  the Monotype 'Matrix Loan Library' as was  will ever work again, I'm a shade uncertain.

But then someone on here may know ...

[stafford]

This gets more interesting  the more I look. Albion is quite right, its  not Palace, but another copperplate script.

Looking closely, looks much like a match for SB's Imperial. Mow Palace 429 had been properly and legally licensed to the Monotype Drawing Office by Stephenson Blake, so its conceivable that Mono had a look at another lighter face as a commercial possibility, maybe trial strikes?

[David Bolton]

Just to re-iterate. The 280 shown is NOT the series number, but a serial number, allocated probably in chronological order by someone at Monotype, for the next design of a special letter to match series 7 (or whatever other series might have required it.)

The special letters are hardly ever shown on the official specimen sheets - which do indicate the 'normal' accented characters in a list along the bottom of the sheet. For some typefaces, such as Garamond, Monotype did issue a special specimen page showing the swash and (some of) the ligatured characters, all these being un-numbered, and some layout sheets also identify some of the numbered special letters, which are indeed also listed on the specimen page, e.g. for Bell series 341.

It is annoying that Monotype never issued a full list of all the 'special' characters after the one they issued pre 1931, but as there are some 26000 of the letters I suppose it would have been asking too much!

None of this answers the question of what face (if any) the design of these particular special letters  is based. If seen as something in its own right, Monotype might have assigned an L series number to the letters, much as they did for the Pitman ITA letters that match Ehrhardt, and indeed those all have serial numbers as shown on the specimen page (assuming those are part of L211 and L219).

The specimen sheet does not show the L series number, however. I do not know what series number is stamped on the matrices - hopefully the L number and not the actual Ehrhardt number, being 453 and 573.

[Richard Lawrence]

I used to work on mathematics books on the publishing side of OUP. I made a study of the history of mathematical typesetting at Reading.

Modern Series 7 was the face used by OUP and one or two other printers for maths before the advent of the Monotype 4-line maths system. (I think the face was chosen by OUP as they had a huge number of special sorts for it already as it was used for the Dictionaries.)

Individual script letters (usually caps) are sometimes called for in maths setting. Might these mats be part of a maths collection, the face chosen to match the weight and so on of the Modern Series 7 around it? (Palace is quite light.)

Anyone using TeX/LaTeX, created by Donald Knuth, might note that Computer Modern that Knuth designed for digital setting of maths is modelled on Modern Series 7 which is the face he was used to seeing in 'properly' typeset maths books.

[David Bolton]

As Richard has just suggested, the mats are indeed for Mathematical use using Modern Extended series 7.

As it happens I have just cast mat serial 781A which is a script A, and which is identified as series 7 in 10pt. So hopefully the A in John's collection is also marked 781.

The full list, from 781A to 346Z for series 1 and series 7 is shown under Scripts and Miscellaneous Sorts in 'Monotype' Mathematical Sorts List by Arthur Phillips and published by the Monotype Corporation as a complement to the Monotype Recorder Vol 40 N0.4 1956:  Setting Mathematics.