Typophile

(x) Four fonts from 1951 pizza menu - Brush Script {Riccardo}, Varityper, Univers {Mark}

Alec Quig

Hi all!

I'm doing a website for my favorite pizzeria, and requested one of their old menus for typeface ideas. They came through and gave me this: http://alecquig.com/roccosMenu1951.jpg. Can anyone ID any of the four fonts on this menu?

Thank you for your knowledge!

Alec

That's some expensive pizza! Are we sure that's 1951?

Try entering four dollars into this inflation calculator

A lot of the type looks like it was output by some sort of low-end typewriter kind of machine, such as the IBM Composer or the Varityper. The words "Small" and "Large" appear to be set in some version of Univers (1957), which makes me think this was not actually set in 1951.

Well, continuing the off topic detective work, also the phrase "decidedly not frozen" is a little premature for 1951:
http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question71093.html

This reminds me of that article about the typography in Mad Men that I read a couple of months ago...

:-)

The names of the dishes are definitely not made with an IBM Selectric Composer in Univers. This is done with the mechanical four-unit Varityper. (An IBM Executive typewriter with the Mid-Century face, based on Futura, which might be considered to be close, is also not a possibility; this is a Varityper.)

Captured from web.archive.org on 2 Feb 2010. view this capture