Really great article thought I’d share from Letterform Archive
Once threatened by dispersal, over 60,000 letter templates from the British Linotype company now have a home at Letterform Archive. Written by Stephen Coles
https://letterformarchive.org/news/linotype-drawings
Comments
In particular, MLCo consistently applied Standard alignment throughout their library, whereas L&M did not adopt Standard alignment until later and apparently did not apply it as consistently.
I have a photocopy of a letter from C.H. Griffith to Jackson Burke that touches on this topic and mentions a few specific examples.
I pointed this out in a note I sent to Stephen. In that message, I said that I thought this was less likely to be true of American designs sent to L&M as it would be for British designs coming to MLCo, where they would have been redrawn to conform.
But, I just took a closer look at those few Electra images posted with the news release, and they don’t seem to conform to standard alignment. So L&M might have been in the habit of redrawing American designs on different alignment for their market as well.
I don’t have any copies of MLCo drawings of Electra in my collection, so I can’t compare directly. But the dimensions that I see don’t jibe with the table of Standard alignments that I have.
The practical result of these differences would be seen in subtly different ascender & descender heights between equivalent faces from the two manufacturers.