Another tech history quickie to entertain my brain without spending much time on it.
I’ve been thinking about typesetting lately. This recent item on prescription alcohol during prohibition linked to the ‘standard’ web picture of those prescription blanks. The blanks were set in what I call Record Gothic. We used this font for most of our work, invoices and letterheads and such.
Here’s what I remember:
I remember the font itself, I remember how to use the Ludlow, and I remember that the font was labeled Record Gothic.
Today I looked up some actual Ludlow documents and ran into an oddity. This PDF from the Ludlow company is undated but the samples of advertisements look like 1950. The featured machine is the open version, earlier than the cased version we used in the 1970s.
The 1950 book shows Record Gothic as a sans font with no serifs at all. It’s completely different from the font we called Record Gothic.
The font we used, with a hint of serifs, was identical to what the book calls Lining Plate Gothic.
Puzzle! My memory of the font itself is definite. My memory of the name on the Ludlow drawers is somewhat less definite. Did a previous typesetter mislabel the drawers? Did Ludlow rename its own fonts between 1950 and 1970?
Polistra's Mill 