Hello all -
Mostly for the thrill of the hunt, I’m looking to identify the typeface used as display type in the early rulebooks for the Traveller role-playing game from the late 1970s and early 1980s. After a few years the display face changed to Optima, and the differences were very slight. In fact, there are examples where the two are mixed, with an old logo and new Optima type above it.
Overall, the face is extremely similar to Optima in form of almost all letters and punctuation I’ve seen, oblique and roman both. The oblique form is more upright than Optima’s though, and some letters like F and L may be more condensed.
The mystery face generally has softer edges and is less delicate, with less cupped terminals. Actually, it often tends to look like a badly worn letterpress font of Optima, and maybe that’s where the maker started from. But there are a few letters that are quite distinct in form. The most obvious is A, which has its righthand stroke continued above its lefthand one. Its crossbar is also high. It’s distinctive, and is one of the reasons I want to find this face, which otherwise looks like a fairly mediocre knockoff of Optima.
Here’s a bit of the logo in mystery face and in Optima for comparison of oblique caps, including the A:
I should note that the A is this same shape in plain roman, too, not just in the oblique form.
The other differences I’ve noticed are
1) the apostrophe (or single quote), which is a sharp triangle in the mystery face, unlike the rounded pinball-flipper shape in Optima:
(Try to ignore the fact that the Optima sample is a heavier weight - when they’re the same weight, most letters are nearly identical.)
&
2) the y, which has a curved tail in the mystery face, unlike the sharp triangular end in Optima:
Other than that, differences are subtle to non-existent within the letters I’ve been able to compare. I haven’t found a Q or a J to compare anywhere, nor most non-alphanumerics. 1, 4, question mark and comma do match Optima quite well.
The front page of two books, with mystery and Optima (from which the TRA samples above were taken), can be seen here. I can scan other samples if anyone wants other specific letters, but as I said, I haven’t found any others that aren’t virtually identical to Optima.
Did someone take some Optima and add a new A and y, and change, basically, nothing else? Anyone know what they called it?
Thanks in advance for your attention and help!
