That looks like custom lettering, especially given its age. I've seen lots of similar things in calligraphy and lettering books from that era but not in type books.

Could be custom. If anyone can name something close, I'd appreciate it.

Hermann Zapf's Sistina is in the ballpark, but just barely...

A search for calligraphic and roman on myfonts brings up a few things that might be suitable.

It looks sooo similar to Trajan Bold that has been condensed to me. Some of the characters are almost exactly the same but then the N has a different top.

It looks sooo similar to Trajan Bold that has been condensed to me. Some of the characters are almost exactly the same but then the N has a different top.

Thanks for the suggestions. None are very close though - strange. It has a lot more character than something like Trajan but fills much the same role. No surprise then that it showed up on an old Hollywood poster. Maybe I could recreate this face, provided of course I could ID it and then find something to scan.

Forgive my naivete, but does anyone on the board here know how the designers in the pre-digital age went about selecting faces for film titles on posters like this? I know they pulled from books, but have never seen one myself. Anyone know the titles of the books so I could start looking for them on ebay etc?

Most likely in this case they hired a lettering artist, who drew it from scratch. Just because something looks like it was a font doesn't mean it was a font. The further you go back, the more this is true.

Anyone know the titles of the books so I could start looking for them on ebay etc?

The Speedball manuals or the many volumes of Dover alphabets are a good place to start. I've found a lot of good books on eBay simply searching under "lettering book". Some mid-20th Century gems that are fairly common in the US include "Modern Brush Lettering" by Harold Holland Day and "ABC of Lettering" by Carl Holmes. Type specimens would be used as reference just as much as books of hand-lettered alphabets.

However, an experienced lettering artist would probably draw a roman serif like this without the need for any reference material. To make a digital font from this logo it would be better to learn how to build the missing letters from the information in the ones you've got, which Leslie Carbarga explains in his "Logo, Font and Lettering Bible" and Bruce Willen & Nolen Strals cover in "Lettering & Type", rather than expect to find a complete alphabet to scan and trace.