Personally you can freely use them to great affect in your RSS reader or mail app that you read everyday.
I’m also a big fan of Igino Marini’s recreation of the Fell typefaces:
The Fell Types took their name from John Fell, a Bishop of Oxford in the seventeenth-century. Not only he created an unique collection of printing types but he started one of the most important adventures in the history of typography. — https://web.archive.org/web/20240128075552/https://iginomari...
The IM Fell fonts themselves seem to live on Google Fonts these days: https://fonts.google.com/?query=Igino+Marini
I use Doves Type for… everything. One day I started to find my monomaniacal obsession a bit funny and sort of to spite myself I set every font in Firefox to Doves Type. Serif, sans-serif, monospace, no other fonts allowed, as well as the UI font by tweaking the Firefox user profile iirc.
And it was just… very good. And I kept using it.
I use Doves Type for everything, and to be able to do that on my phone I use iFont: https://apps.apple.com/is/app/ifont-find-install-any-font/id...
Or yeah I do use IBM PC VGA 9x16, IBM BIOS 8x8, and Eagle Spirit PC CGA Board Alternate 3 a little :) From the Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/
I even munged together a combination of Doves Type Regular and IM Fell Great Primer Italic that matches the character scale and linespacing to both each other and to the IBM PC VGA 9x16 font at 1:1 size. The open-source FontForge did the trick!: https://fontforge.org/en-US/
(FontForge can autogenerate italics for any font. If you’re bored, I suggest loading up the classic VGA font and pressing the ITALICIZE button on ot. It’s… interesting!)
In general, on Windows I much prefer MacType’s fomt rendering: https://www.mactype.net … it’s kind of amazing that this kind of surgery is even possible.
I made a native attempt in FontForge (just doing 'merge fonts'), which (unsurprisingly) didn't work.
Some assistant being lazy, or rushing to "finish" a task?
Or sorts that broke, or were worn out, and it was normal to toss things into the river?
Or a ritual? (Say, toss a sort into the river for the first page an apprentice sets, or when there's a press failure, or for superstition after printing very bad news?)
It was normal. Rivers were used for dumping the garbage. In some places they still are. I know about instances in Europe where people dump their trash in streams behind the hamlet.
https://phys.org/news/2020-09-brown-danube-belgrade-sewers-t...
The particular case seem to be a deliberate act of sabotage which sound more believable.
Throwing worn-out or broken types and other tools in the river would probably be common though.
Also, programmers spend a huge fraction of their time reading. Reading code, reading docs, reading reading reading. Fonts are important for us from an ergonomic point of view (and it's also a matter of taste and aesthetics!)
The lost Doves Press typeface and its revival (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791125 - Aug 2019 (9 comments)
How the Doves Type Was Nearly Lost - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12476579 - Sept 2016 (44 comments)
One man's obsession with rediscovering the Doves typeface - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9951869 - July 2015 (32 comments)
Lost typeface printing blocks found in river Thames - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017307 - Feb 2015 (22 comments)
The fight over the Doves: A legendary typeface gets a second life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964013 - Dec 2013 (12 comments)
The H.P. Lovecraft Society has some 19th century fonts, if you need them.[2] Those were recovered from old documents.
> Many of these fonts have slightly rough edges or irregular shapes, to capture the feel of old lead type and bygone printing technologies
There are digital reproductions of old typefaces that try to reproduce the actual weight on the page, but they seem to be not very popular with modern designers unless they are going for a deliberately archaic look.
Later, more famous types, such as Caslon or Garamond, are just variations on this.
From Jenson until the first Grotesk fonts I don't think there was anything large one-time leap, but rather a sequence of gradual evolutions.
I'm less optimistic about the possibility of more large scale digs though, as the Golden Jubilee bridge history³ points out the area is an also an exciting zone for stumbling in to unexploded ordnance and you always seem to be within few metres of a tube line or Victorian sewer.
[It is the reason I love those plucky Crossrail⁴ developers who've felt the anger from the havoc they've left across London over the few past decades. We get incredible large scale engineering works to lust over, coupled with really wacky archaeological digs tagging along for the ride.]
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embanking_of_the_tidal_Thames
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Embankment - Both the "home" of the type in Hammersmith and Fleet were the targets of embankment work in the 19th century
³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_Bridge_and_Golden_J...
My father found a 17th century cork screw.
There must be an absolute wealth of finds along its banks.
https://web.archive.org/web/20121127135748/home1.swipnet.se/...
[1]: https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2013/12/19/the-... (paywalled; https://archive.is/XfK1x)
Archive link, this site won't load at all for me.
https://www.futilitycloset.com/2017/09/04/podcast-episode-16...
Also, I’m curious how there were 500,000 pieces in the typeface.
EDIT: It's the same typeface.
