Comment by fyrn_
9 months ago
They do later talk about the real origin in 1894 in England, with TT&H creating it due to the constraints of their self-built lettering machine to engrave tiny letters on their products
9 months ago
They do later talk about the real origin in 1894 in England, with TT&H creating it due to the constraints of their self-built lettering machine to engrave tiny letters on their products
As I mention in a previous comment [1], this style of hand lettering was common in textbooks prior to 1894. From 1883, for example, we find this specimen in Standard Lettering, published by the Columbia School of Drafting:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43055792
And again, the article explicitly mentions that, with a picture of a similar book:
> I don’t know how this first proto-Gorton was designed – unfortunately, Taylor, Taylor & Hobson’s history seems sparse and despite personal travels to U.K. archives, I haven’t found anything interesting – but I know simple technical writing standards existed already, and likely influenced the appearance of the newfangled routing font.
The issue is that the author presents the entire set of typefaces that are similar to Gorton as derived from Gorton without presenting evidence to rule out the obvious alternative lineage: that, just like genuine Gorton, they too were derived from the various regional single-stroke letterforms that draftsman everywhere were taught and used. Excellent draftsman’s examples abounded and would have been so much more common than genuine Gorton and its genuine ancestors that it’s hard to believe that regional companies marketing their own type engraving machines would have had to copy Gorton rather than local examples of the draftsman’s art that were considered superior.
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As a child, I have learned lettering based on the German DIN standards (DIN 16, DIN 17, DIN 1451).
While these standards date from around 1930, they were based on much older lettering textbooks. The oldest that I have seen was from 1871, and these German textbooks did not differ much from the American textbooks quoted above.