Harpoon.

the Yagi [family]


David Hamuel

* POST EDITED *
Disregard, I just noticed the differences. It's late.

Gah. It *is* late.
And it is indeed Harpoon, except the 'e' in your sample is the 'a', rotated.

As I said in my previous post that I hastily edited, Harpoon is a Bitstream font that came with CorelDraw. I can't find it on MyFonts.

Here's the sample again:

The font was called "Hairpin" and was a Visual Graphics Corporation font that was included in the Image Club old Letterpress 6.0 CD (and earlier). Corel/Bitstream renamed it to a very rough homonym by calling it "Harpoon". (It is no longer in the Image Club collection, as sold now by Agfa at fonts.com).

I'd like to add that I was the person responsible for digitizing Hairpin for the Image Club library back in 1989 from a set of original VGC photo-typositor film reels. I still have numerous older versions of the Letterpress product in the Image Club archives should anyone be interested in obtaining a copy of the older Image Club library. Contact me off-thread.

Mike and Grant - valuable info there. Shows how much of a newbie I am
Very enlightening, this thread.

Nice to 'meet' you Grant. I have the Image Club Letterpress 5.0 and 6.0 Collections, bought before Image Club was acquired by Adobe, then sold to Getty Images/Eyewire, then acquired by Agfa-Monotype.

As for you being a 'newbie' Adriano, this is a field were the old-timers have maybe only been here for 15 years, things change so fast. I got my first Image Club catalog back about then, and bought my first fonts in 1993 starting with one of the earlier Letterpress CD's (3.0, I think). Just like so many other trendy things, 'everything old is new again' with fonts too. When House Industries gets to digitizing the Photo-Lettering typefaces they recently acquired, we'll all get to see how true that saying is.

Well, 15 years ago I was 7 years old... therefore a newbie I am

Hi Mike. Nice to meet another Image Club customer (and fan?) Here's a bit of historical information about the first Letterpress (and ICG type library) - when it was first released, it consisted of twice the number of fonts that currently existed in the Adobe Type Library at the time. Mind you, they were all type three PostScript format, but....

I know I've only been hanging around the type business for 15 years or so, but I definitely feel like an old-timer.

great, thanks a lot guys. this ones been stumping me for a while.

its quite bizarre, i've never really seen this typeface used anywhere, then the other day i saw it used in my local street press in some cheap ad and thought "how did they mangage to get a copy of that font?". now i know.

i also thought "harpoon" was an unusual name for a typeface like that, hairpin is much more fitting.

mike, i did a search on fonts.com for hairpin/harpoon and didn't come up with anything, any other ideas?

The Image Club digitization of Hairpin was the only one that ever there was, as far as I can recall. The Corel Harpoon was actually the ICG version renamed for third-party bundling in a brief lapse of marketing judgement back in the early 1990's.

Iota: Google -> hairpin

I presume that the resulting finds are all (illicit) PC conversions of the original Mac Hairpin font. Is that correct Grant?

iota,

I did say that Agfa no longer has 'Hairpin' in the Image Club collection. Grant offered to help out with any needs from that old collection that included "Hairpin", so perhaps you should contact him off-list. Your other course would be to use Fontseek to see if anyone has placed it out on another site. If it's been renamed again then it would be luck more than anything if you find any other versions.

Hmm... apparently it's in a fair number of "free" font sites. :|

thanks for the tip mike F... i did actually search on google quite extensively for hairpin/harpoon before i asked for any more help. all i got back were its known aliases, no leads to where i could buy it from though.

sorry mike Y, i read this as meaning i could get it from fonts.com.

"(It is no longer in the Image Club collection, as sold now by Agfa at fonts.com)"

lol, well i found a copy of it on a free font site. grant will probably have a fit if he sees this.

Wow. Are the curves really f-ed up like that?

sure are, although i didn't expect much from a free font site.

Ouch, that's nasty.
Must be "Hairpin Grunge", eh?

Sorry iota. It doesn't surprise me, though,
that this unapproved conversion is a mess.
I hadn't looked at it closely.

> I presume that the resulting finds are all (illicit)
> PC conversions of the original Mac Hairpin font.

Historically, some of the freeware versions of Hairpin floating around are indeed TTF conversions of the original Image Club Mac PS files. However, the example shown above is definitely not representative of the original outlines. I did locate a version of Hairpin that was converted to LaserJet soft fonts from dry-transfer originals, though.

> Ouch, that's nasty.

Yes, but interesting. It makes you wonder how many generations of conversion it took to produce that result.

Well it does have that certain je-ne-sais-quoi...

>> Must be "Hairpin Grunge", eh?
> It makes you wonder how many generations of
conversion it took to produce that result.

This would've been sooo hip 10 years ago.