That does look familiar to me, and I spent a little while studying Ihlenburg's body of work, so I am suspecting it is indeed his.

There is a collection of Ihlenburg stuff at the Cary Library (at RIT in Rochester, New York). At the time it was acquired, David Pankow wrote an article about Ihlenburg's work. I think I have a copy of this, but it is not accessible right now, as we are preparing to move.

Cheers,

T

This is in fact exactly the sort of thing ATF produced a lot of around the turn of the century.

Your best bet is a book called "Specimens of type, brass rules and dashes, ornaments and borders, society emblems, check lines, cuts, initials and other productions of the American Type Founders Co.", edited by A Lawson and J Bidwell (New York, Garland, 1981). But that's also a facsimile, so it won't be the best quality.

Another way would be to track down an actual ATF specimen book, but an early one: I suspect the famous 1923 edition doesn't have this font. FYI, the Lawson book is based [mostly] on the specimen of 1896.

A third approach is to see if this was ever made available as a phototype face (shudder), although procuring specimens of such would probably cost you something.

hhp

>> Another way would be to track down an actual ATF specimen book.

I'd really like to find a specimen book, but i don't know where to begin to look for one. Also, do you have any idea what purchasing such a specimen book would cost? Basically I'm looking for whatever I can find to help me finish up this project.

Keep posting! I'm getting some good information here! thanks for all your help thus far...

Okay i have more questions... so how do i find more information about american type founders?

>>A third approach is to see if this was ever made available as a phototype face
I believe that's what Solotype specialized in and this face is part of their catalog, but I don't know of any way to contact Dan Solo these days.

Paul, I just looked through the 1923 ATF Specimen, and didn't see this in there. So, like Hrant says, you might look for an earlier one.

>such a specimen book would cost?

I got mine off eBay - it's got a torn spine and two or three torn pages, and I believe I paid only $40. But I don't know if that's a fair average.

> i don't know where to begin to look for one.

Are you in college? I get my stuff mostly from UCLA (used to work there), which has a great typography collection. I don't know the situation in Phoenix (I guess your closest "college town", unless Flagstaff has something), but if you can tap the help of a college friend he can do what's called an "inter-library loan" for you on virtually anything. Purchasing: if you get lucky like Nathan, great - keep your eyes open, but don't expect something to just fall in your lap.

Contacting Dan Solo: it shouldn't be too hard to track him down. But I have a feeling he won't be much help sans cash. BTW, how lousy is the repro in the solo book? Do you have a hi-res scan handy? Just a few glyphs will be enough to tell. And one other thing: the sample would have to be extremely high quality for you to avoid "spending a lot of time on each letter". And the fact that this was a metal face means that no sample is going to be extremely good anyway... One thing you could do though is go for the "rough look".

Info about ATF: You might start by reading the restrospective in issue 43/44 of the American Printing History Association journal: http://www.printinghistory.org/htm/journal/current.html

hhp

Found this face in a friend's copy of J.I. Biegeleisen's Antique Alphabets.

"Originally designed as a foundry type back in 1889 by H. Ihlenburg, Nymphic is now available as a Typositor film font."

Unfortunately, that's all the information it gives. Besides saying that the lower case "is admirably suited for continuous reading matter and body copy." :-/

The book does cantain a decent repro of a full character set at about 72 points or so - minus the swashes. If you want, I can scan it and send it to you.

>>If you want, I can scan it and send it to you.
I would appreciate that A LOT! if you could do so, zip it and email me your scans at pauldhunt@yahoo.com. I can live without the swashes (for now) but I'm hoping that your book has punctuation too???

>>One thing you could do though is go for the "rough look".
For some reason I feel that this would completely destroy my whole purpose in trying to fontify this particular face... I appreciate this one because of it's delicate nature and beauty, maybe once i clean it up I can hack it to bits tho, but not before. I have been spending quite a bit of time on each of the characters that I have been able to scan sucessfully. Perhaps I'll try to post a sample for you of how i'm doing so far tomorrow. Keep yer ideas/info coming! i appreciate it a lot. thnx.

>your book has punctuation too???
Unfortunately, no. Just the upper case & lower case. My friend has some other books around the same era however. I'll look through them this week, and see if Nymphic shows up anywhere in them.

In the meantime, whatare your scanning preferences. I.e., format and dpi...

>>whatare your scanning preferences

i'd prefer a tiff for PC at high res, at 72 pts 600 dpi should be sufficient (I should think) Thanks again for all your help!

okay folks, here is what i've got so far. I'm uploading a pdf of the letterforms that I've got so far. all the caps at the top are all the caps i have got, i have most of the lowercase characters, but am missing j, p, q,and x. these letters are well on their way to being finished (i hope) but some of them still need a bit of tweaking and smoothing out. anyhow, without further ado...

My letterforms to date (1/20/04) Nymphic Sample.pdf (11.7 k)

Hey, not bad!
You're right, the "rough look" would have sucked. It usually does anyway.

hhp

Paul: will get that to you Wedensday evening/Thrusday morning. Rockin' PDF BTW.

hey guys, thanks for the feedback. i could use some good constructive criticism if any of you have any suggestions, i dunno if i'm ready to post this on the critiquing board, i'd like to be a little further along before i do that (like have all my letters formed) anyhow... thanks nathan, i'll be looking forward to yer email. ciao for now.

>>how lousy is the repro in the solo book? Do you have a hi-res scan handy?

sorry hrant, it took me a while to get back to this one. i'm posting part of a scan that i just made of the Solotype Catalog. the characters aren't tooooo, bad, but if i could get them just a bit sharper than this i could hopefully incorporate some of the finer subtleties that this repo doesn't seem to quite capture. so here it is... so you can see, it's kinda muddy... i'd prefer something a bit sharper (btw i scanned this in at 1200 dpi then resized it to 72dpi for upload)

No, this wouldn't do. You can get pretty sharp outlines out of this with some pre-processing, but the wobbles (like the bottom-left of the "C") would be headache central.

But anyway, it seems you don't even really need scans, no?

hhp

I wish i were that good!!! All of the letters i've digitized so far i've had scans for, but i'm missing a lot of letters and i have no punctuation, but nathan said he'd send me what he could, and in the meantime i'm still looking... I might try my hand at some of the swash caps tonite... we'll see how big a headache that'll be.

Somebody has got to Nymphic before you. It's a Pole called Barmee (www.barmee.com) who calls his recreation Secesja. However, it still leaves a lot to be desired, especially in the matter of spacing.

Mb

Sorry, Barmee's site seems to have gone offline since the start of the year. You'll find the font on this Polish site - http://www.digit.pl/czcionki/s1.asp

Thank you Jiminez, Thank you. believe it or not, I was aware of the barmee version of this font and you're right... it does leave a lot to be desired, and not ust in matters of spacing. There are no lower case letters, virtually no punctuation, and if you copare the letter forms to the ones that i digitized (not to be a snob or anything) secesja misses a lot of the finer subtelties of this fine face (in my own opinion) I was considering just cleaning up the barmee version, but i thought it'd be easier just to start from scratch, even if i had to go to the trouble of finding printed samples of the font. Anyhow, thanks for the heads up, preciate that. any other useful information, feel free to pass it along. Thnx for your interest!

You're so right! I had thought of pointing out some of the things that were missing but reckoned you'd work 'em all out for yourself. Boy, what you've got so far on that PDF file is miles ahead in precision. The serifs on uprights are completely different and it's rather difficult to work out from the example of the original which of you is right. One thing I know is that I can't wait for you to get your version finished. I've tried out Secesja on projects and it's much too unstable to trust. I want yours (and soon!)

I've just been looking at sBob's Nymph, by the way - an extremely free variation which takes its beginning from Nymphic. I'd always wondered how it got that name but assumed it was because of the rash of fairy fonts that were appearing back in the 1990s - WSI's Fairy Scroll Display, for instance. It looks like you're set to be the Prospero (and to hell with bloody old boring Gandalph) of the new Millennium.

The other near approach is Dave Nalle's Acadian, which he made for Scriptorium in 1994. The letter forms are close in certain instances but his source is different from yours. The note reads Source material from the type collection of Steve Saxe. Original design by H.H.Thorpe (1883). Now that raises a bit of interesting history, doesn't it? Even in those days folk were copying from and improving on one another's work. Is there a history of this aspect of fo(u)nt evolution, do you know?

Mb

>>jimenez,
i'm not quite sure what that prospero commet was about, but I rather like gandalf!

>>brian,
thanks for the criticism. to answer you briefly - yes, these letterforms (of mine) are still in their formative stages. right now i've been focusing more on standardizing the uprights and serifs and just smoothing out the general outline. i'll pay more attention to the ball serifs once i get that outta the way. i think i'll try to standardize them, leaning more toward a ball serif for the uppercase, but i really have been trying to stay true to the printed samples that i have available to me. but that presents another problem... the quality of the printed samples i have varies, so i'm unsure sometimes how i should proceed. The ball on the falling swash of the C is just one case in point... I'll post some scan comparisons tomorrow so you can see what i mean. anyhow, the short answer to your question is yes, the ball serifs should be standardized (as much as possible) but i don't believe all of them were the same even in the original font... like i said i'm just trying to stay true to Hermann. for now this project is just more of a learning experience for me as i'm not eally an "xpert," just a novice here. This is actually my first attempt at trying to put a font together. (this weekend i was trying to teach my self how to add open type features and was moderately sucessful!) maybe someday if i ever get the polish just right on this one i'll try to realease it for marketing or something. i'd love to hear your other questions though! i've got a question for you, since you're a perfectionist (like i try to be) what do you think of the mismatched spurs (take a look at the C, G & S) Some i've rounded off and some are still sharp on the ends. do you think that detracts from the design? anyhow, thanks for your input.

Anyhow, I was looking at some information that somebody originaly gave me that tipped me off on the designer of this font and it says that this face originaly belonged to a foundry named MacKellar. http://www.klingspor-museum.de/KlingsporKuenstler/Schriftdesigner/Ihlenburg/Ihlenburg.pdf

Anybody know anything about this foundry? Anyhow, my search goes on...

<font class="dontLookLikeCrap">Brian, thanks for more great criticism/comments. i sometimes look over things (like the R) i guess i'm still learning a lot in this process. and about Gill Sans, that's one of my favorite faces! althought I hadn't noticed the weight difference before. and yes there is one in Nymphic (a wt diff that is) All the settings I've seen of this font (which is a small number) are with the lower case set with a higher baseline than the caps as in the following scans that i promied i would upload, so here you go...</font>so as you can see the scan to the left is from the songbook i mentioned in my initial post, the scan to the right is from the solotype catalog. so from the one on the right it seems to me that the ball serif on the C is actually a ball whereas on the right it looks like a teardrop. this is exactly why i am interested in finding more high quality print samples, so i can keep as true to the design as possible... still looking for those samples tho (can be hard here in rural Arizona) so if anyone has any hot leads for me, i'm still hunting...

MacKellar: How much depth are you looking for?

BTW, metal cap sorts that are designed to nestle lc at a smaller size are called "mortised".
Like this: http://www.themicrofoundry.com/other/koster_b.gif (H-flipped, of course.)
(Since uploading that I've learned that this font is actually called Euclid, not Koster.)

hhp

give me the Reader's Digest condensed version of MacKellar, if you please.

>> At the time it was acquired, David Pankow wrote an article about Ihlenburg's work

Tom, do you know if this article is anywhere online? or how i could find it otherwise?