A look at some old-school fonts...

Let's take a step back to the late 1980s for a moment...

I was in college majoring in graphic design and, unlike today, there wasn't a Mac on every designer's desktop. In fact, I almost quit the program my Junior year because I'd been hand-lettering the type on a letterhead mockup for three hours straight, continuing to mess up and curse life because I knew if we would just get some damn computers I'd have been done in ten minutes!!! In 1987/1988 (my sophomore year), I knew that the Mac would be the wave of the future and had to take some Communications electives just to get a chance to work on the macs (I think maybe 4 hours for the entire semester). In 1989, there still weren't any Macs (or computers of any sort for that matter) in the art department. The school paper did, however, have a Mac setup (two SE's and a Macintosh II)... but the paper only had them because I (as the Art Director in cahoots with the Editor-elect) told them to get rid of the old Agfaset. Back in the old-world-ways of the art department, we were still putting copied pages from Letraset type sample books in a photo-enlarger-style Art-O-Graph projector and having to hand-letter that shit for hours at at time. Utterly ridiculous by today's standards when I think that stuff that used to take me an hour or so to hand-letter can now be accomplished in a few seconds.

Granted, the variety of fonts on the Mac at the time were rather limited. The system-standard fonts were the ones mostly named for cities (New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Geneva, et al.) Additional postscript fonts were available, but expensive and also limited. By contrast, the Letraset catalog had all these really great fonts, though many of them were sadly out-of-date for the late 80s, but still available as rub-down transfers (the heart of Letraset's offering) and were, therefore, represented in the catalog. Nowadays, we take the landfill-sized variety of fonts for granted. In the late 80s, only those of us with access to these kinds of graphics resources (e.g., architects, designers, etc.) knew what was there. That Letraset book began my love affair with type, particularly those of the funky persuasion.

My late-80s edition of the book "died" years ago from mis-use; it was spiral bound and the pages just didn't stand much of a chance. But I do have a 1981 edition that I bought several years ago as a shelf reference; it's perfect bound and, therefore, not subject to the same issues as a well-handled spiral book. What's below are pictures from that 1981 edition of some of the fonts that I've long been in love with, but that also fit in to the old-school RPG aesthetic.

Just a warning... many freebie versions of the fonts listed below are bad/clunky conversions/copies of the originals, and suffer from both compromised forms and bad kerning pairs (kerning is the space between two individual letters, and in bad type faces, these kerning pairs are largely ignored, leaving "gaps" in words when typeset).

The cover of the 1981 edition of the Letraset catalog.

Galadriel. Designed by Alan Meeks in 1975. Named (I assume) for the LoTR character. There are freebie forms of this, but a decent version is available for about $30.

Marvin.There are bad versions available of this font, but if a decent commercial is available, it's possibly got a different name.

Arnold Böcklin. This baby goes back to 1904; the Art Nouveau influence should be obvious. Corel draw came with a version named Arabia so people assumed an Easter/Oriental influence, though it's very "French." And, yes... it is the typeface White Dwarf magazine used during its early days.

Tip Top. The original version of this font was released by a German type foundry in Leipzig. Again, this is an Art Nouveau era font, but I think 60s pulp fantasy when I see this one.

Hunter. This is another one I've seen used in the past on books, but can't seem to find a digital version at all, much less a bad one.

Quentin. We should all recognize this one. However, it is a victim of poor conversions and the freebies really suck. However, a decent version is available for only $20.

Souvenir. This is the BX typeface, and the font family I've adopted as the house typeface for my Oe/BX/1e compatible stuff (Old School Adventures). Luckily, this is one of the first digital typefaces I ever owned. It's never really gone out of style, but was still pretty commonly used in the early 90s when I started building my Postscript type collection.

Futura Display. A great 60s pulp sci-fi feel. Or if you want to see uses of this one that are more general, check out this link.

Company. The problem with finding a copy of this one is the name. I guarantee that putting the word "company" in a Google search doesn't do a damn thing for finding this face.

Thalia. This is the DragonQuest typefaces. And it's probably the best example of being the most poorly converted (even worse than Quentin).

Pretorian (aka Pretoria). I've really been looking for an occasion to use this one. In fact, I want to use it so bad, I would consider naming and designing an adventure just to fit the personality of this typeface. (Hey, I'm sure we've all created adventures around far smaller kernels of an idea than that.)

Eckmann Schrift. Designed in 1900 by German Otto Eckmann to reflect Japanese calligraphy (Japanisme ran rampant during the Art Nouveau era).

Serif Gothic. This was designed by typography mastermind Herb Lubalin in 1974. The typeface Lubalin is best known for is probably Avant Garde (the typeface used by TSR on the first wave of adventure modules).