Reminds me of something which might be referred to in one of Nicolette Grey’s books on lettering. It looks very familiar.

Thanks Tiffany. I am familiar with Nicolette Grey’s books on lettering, but I haven’t come across this particular specimen or others in the font there. This kind of letterform originated with the practice of drawing large versal with the same broadpen as used for writing text or notes in musical scores. Typographic versions of such versals are not unusual, but the raffia-like flourishes embodied in the bottom left and top tight corner of the specimen I showed are. Mostly the flourishes are of the type shown in the top left corner.

Have you tried the Moorstation? I don’t recall the name of the person who runs it and I’m not sure it is 100% above board (would be nice to know).

No I haven’t tried it. What is the Moorstation?

Peter,

Tiffany must be referring to Typoasis at Moorstation.org.

You might want to check out Manfred Klein and Dieter Steffmann in Designers.

Tiffany & Lauri,

I had a look at http://www.moorstation.org/typoasis/typoasis1.htm. Lots of historical stuff there. So far I haven’t seen my “Alkmaar A” (my name for it—the sample book I saw it in was published in Alkmaar). Most of the comparable material I looked at was downloadable for free (.ttf) and pulling the files into my old fontographer software showed hundreds of control points per glyph.

Yeah, those Moorstation-fonts are made ‘quick and dirty’ — presumably by scanning artwork and tracing these autostyle.

Re your original question, I HAVE seen this letter(style) somewhere. In my mind it’s somehow connected with Albrecht Dürer, which would place it in the 16-hundreds. And I have a feeling that it has been republished in a Dover book, somewhere in the 70’s (eg 30+ years ago).

But this is all conjecture (and proof that the mind really withers with aging, haha).