Can anyone Id the font on the attached image. Its from a sign dated around 1870s.
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| FG Sign 1870s letters.jpg | 29.25 KB |
Can anyone Id the font on the attached image. Its from a sign dated around 1870s.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| FG Sign 1870s letters.jpg | 29.25 KB |
Looks like some sort of Bodoni Compressed but hard to say with the distortion, serifs look bigger on my suggestion. A Bodoni Condensed Black might work as well.
This was a typeface known as "Roman" which was popular during the third quarter of the 19th century. Note the extreme thick-thin contrast like Didot or Bodoni. Also note the huge pointed-wedge shaped beaks on E, G, L, T & S and mini unbracketed serifs. Foundry terminology varied but Roman Extra Condensed Italic, or Roman Elongated Slope would fit. Here is a condensed version, with no slope, from Bruce Foundry 1869.

Thanks to Don, digged a bit more and found these 3 ones, all from Wooden Type Foundry and possibly some digitizations of "Roman" as identified by him: Roman X (no more available to sell unfortunately), Penny and Roman Wells
Thanks Ryuk for posting the Wooden Type Foundry fonts. I won't duplicate the references.
A few more: Matthew Carter's Elephant Regular is a well designed presentation of a design that is somewhere between Thororowgood and the font that formed the basis for your image. Somewhat similar is Monotype's 1931 design for Falstaff. Berthold's 1860 design, Normand BQ includes a condensed version and an italic version but not a condesnsed italic. There is also a Bitstream version of Normande.
Don
For a not exact, but fairly close to your image, rendition of the letters in your image see the following image using Woodentype's Roman Xtra Cond, wqhich also shows the letters with a slope of 4 degrees:

Captured from web.archive.org on 2 Apr 2015. view this capture