The Script Style of House Numbers

John Savard

I found this video on YouTube about the style of digits used for house numbers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HgD3v1ASP4

and I felt that it would be of interest to many people here.

After watching the video more fully, though, I am not so sure. He doesn't really come to any conclusions, not being able to solve the mystery or even get very far towards doing so.

It is about numbers that look like this:

As a result of researching the subject after watching the video, when I see a house with this style of numbers... but not in the shiny silver color of nickel-plated aluminum, or the golden color of brass... but black, I won't be able to pass them without wondering, at least a tiny bit in a secret part of my soul... if those numbers are made of genuine Bower-Barff rustless iron!

Bower and Barff invented a process of coating iron with iron oxide to protect it from rust; it is one of the alternative materials listed in a catalog in which house numbers in this style appear.

Florian Hardwig

Don’t have time to watch the video right now, so apologies if I’m repeating things you already know. But here’s a 2018 tweet by Tobias Frere-Jones, showing such numerals in a c.1929 catalog by H W Knight & Son. In 2006, H&FJ made Bayside, a digital font based on that model, as part of the Numbers series.

John Savard

Although the video probably isn't worth watching in full, because it fails to fully resolve the mystery, it does note that the H. W. Knight and Son catalog isn't the origin of the style of numbers. Instead, instances of house numbers in this style go as far back as 1904. And, apparently, the reputed association with Chinoiserie is also spurious. So, while the video doesn't answer where those numbers came from, it does debunk false notions that have been echoed frequently.

Here is the relevant page from the earliest example he found, a 1904 catalog by S. W. Reese & Co.: