What I most like is this piece of fine work.
The printer/setter tried and succeeded to make a colourful text without boring repeats.
Throughout the whole book he tried to use different ampersands whenever possible
(or better: whenever they were to close).
Very thoughtful work.
Michael

Michael --> What is this text?

It's from a book printed 1653 about ... my latin leaves me.
I think it's about the honestly and dignite habit of priests (my english leaves me too).
Here the title: (note the two ampersands in the line above the illustration!)

Michael

Look at those long ss'.

_smc

Here's an example of the Mother of All Ampersands.

This is the Tironian et sign, which is still used today in Gaelic text (it is known in Irish as agus). This sign derives from the Roman judicial shorthand system developed by Marcus Tullius Tiro, Cicero's scribe and namesake of a certain type foundry. The top of the Tironian ampersand is aligned to the x-height. Sometimes it descends below the baseline, looking like -- sometimes too much like -- an oldstyle number seven; in other examples it stops at the baseline. All Gaelic fonts should contain this characters. Note that it has its own Unicode codepoint, U+204A, to distinguish it from the usual ampersand, because it is sometimes found in texts used alongside the modern form.

For a wide variety of approaches, check out Adobe's subset of Poetica that's all ampersands, all the time.

Another one: I was surprised and pleased by the ampersand that comes with Lux Sans

Some historical ligatures (including et)

http://gymn-benedictinum.de/san_projekt/augustinus/ligatur_1.htm

Wow.
Do_you/does_anybody know how comprehensive this is?

hhp

hrant: Do you mean the whole latin project page?

http://gymn-benedictinum.de/san_projekt/augustinus/

I`m sure other usefull sources like this are on the net. But mostly not in english. :-)

I can't read German (yet) so I'm wondering:
What is that list of abreviations, exactly? Just a collection from a single document, or from an exhaustive list of documents, or what? And what about the "parent" page?

Like if somebody wanted to put those in his font, how well would those two pages cover him?

hhp

Him, hope I can translate it right. This site is a school project of a christian monk monastery.

The letters and ligatures derived from historical hand written sources and help to read and decode the old latin scripts from the library.

The project was inspired by same samples from a book restorage. In the upcoming time of letter print, most of the original scripts used or cuted to repair the "new" and "better" printed books. Nowadays some of such historical samples will be found in such early printed books if they will be restored again.

Like yesterday or so, some new unknown samples of the "hildebrands lied" are found in an Austrian monastery.

So, these samples are for historical research only and not samples for new fonts designs. :-)

Back to the topic - It`s interesting to see such historical forms.

The list is far from comprehensive, although it does contain the most frequenly encountered scribal contractions. The standard texts on scribal contractions are:

Cappelli, Adriano. Lexicon abbreviaturarum: dizionario di abbreviature latine ed italiane.

Chassant, Louis-Alphonse. Dictionnaire des abr

Thanks to both!

> for historical research only

Or setting historical texts. Or showing off.

hhp

John,
Thanks for that bit of info on the Tironian et sign. I never made the connection. Here's a little more info that you may or may not already know.

The Tironian et sign was also used in Irish manuscripts as a shorthand form of 'et' and 'ead' when they constituted a whole syllable. (1)
If you tag on a 'c' you get 'etc.' (2)
It was also used for '

Hey, what's that font? ;-)

hhp

Hey, what's that font? ;-)

Historical and showing off

M.

Dolly from underware (http://www.underware.nl) I like:

Dolly normal, Dolly Small Caps and Dolly Italic.

Michael

Oh yes, the Dolly ampersands are splendid. We use the one on the right in the promotional material for the ATypI conference in Vancouver. Just the ampersand, mind you; everything else is in Matthew Carter's Fenway and Jeremy Tankard's Shaker.

there are some nice ampersand samples like this one designed by robert granjon in the article on the adobe website: http://www.adobe.com/type/topics/theampersand.html (which i'm sure many of you have already read)

Here's a rubbing of another Irish ampersand I'm very fond of by Michael Biggs:

and here's a photo:


Matha

Nice rub.

hhp

this is nice, it just showed up in my office on a paper sample, can anyone identify it?

wow you guys are slow today; )

Pascal 60 pt:


hhp