An interesting logotype

Nick Shinn
Nick Shinn Posts: 2,255
in History of Typography
I’ve never seen this before.
Ligatures/logotypes for:

period_quotedblright
and
comma_quotedblright

From the back of a 1959 record sleeve. (Capitol Records, California)


Comments

  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,458
    Are you sure it is a ligature? Xacto knives were well used in those days--even by me ;-)
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,255
    Well, if you were that finnickity, why would you not also trim the space between r and period?

    At any rate, this thread is a probe, to see if any type drawers have insight, such as yours. Thanks!

  • Mike Wenzloff
    Mike Wenzloff Posts: 106
    I've seen this punctuation treatment on posters. An example would be the mis-attributed Hitler quotation poster from the 1970s uses a tightly tracked/kerned Windsor for the text and the end quote hangs over the ellipsis at the end.


  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,458
    ellipsis looks like different font?

  • Mike Wenzloff
    Mike Wenzloff Posts: 106
    edited February 2017
    Chris—I used the Opti version for remaking the poster. It has near square period/ellipsis than say URW's rounded cornered, a little bouncy version. There are more differences, but I used what I had.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,255
    edited February 2017
    Art directors such as Lois and Lubalin would do this sort of thing in headlines, in the 1960s (and me, in the 1980s) by splicing, if not typositor, but this is body text.
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,458
    Isn't this an album cover?  Guys who did cover art back in my day were far more picky than most designers.  Album art was a primo gig and was a great way to get notoriety so greater care was taken.
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 978
    Nice to see confirmed. I had checked my Linotype Supplement from 1948 and they don’t appear there.

    It would be interesting to know what prompted Linotype to make up these punctuation logotypes for Times and when they were introduced. This was not a common element in their typical font, afaik.
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 978
    Addendum: Actually, looking more carefully, I see now that there are a couple faces with these additional sorts in the 1948 Supplement — mostly popular book faces: Caledonia, Electra, Janson, et al.

    I guess TNR was too new to the library for these to have been included yet in 1948.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,255
    what prompted Linotype
    Perhaps it was the trend towards single spaces between sentences.
    If people were used to two spaces, a sentence ending in <period-doublequote-space> followed by capital T, V, Y or W would put the quote closer to the capital than the previous word, seeming mighty peculiar.

Categories