One of my auto history books has a chapter of advertising for Willys variants in other countries. Willys covered more of the world than GM, and its foreign branches often developed totally original cars using their own talents and skills.
This 1977 ad was a template provided by AMC during its ownership of Willys, letting local companies fill in their own text to advertise the new diesel CJ. The sample text was clearly made by a Lorem Ipsum generator.
It’s not quite the same as the text generated by modern computers; the inflections end in -d or -b too often, while modern generators have accurate inflections. Photo typesetting systems in the 60s and 70s had their own proprietary computers, which would have been capable of generating text.
A page on the history of Lorem Ipsum claims that it began when a printer in the 1500s used pi to print a sample. This doesn’t make sense. A pied form is just random. If you’re going to arrange type to print a sample that looks readable, you’d pull it from a case, not from a pied galley.
The same page says (more convincingly) that the source came from a book on good and evil by Cicero. Guessing a scenario: The printer had just finished with the Cicero text when a customer wanted a sample. They kept one page of the text around to run off samples when needed. The lead gradually degraded, so the compositor subbed letters to keep it fresh and readable. He wasn’t an expert in classical Latin but he knew how Latin looked.
Though I spent several years setting type in the ’70s, I never saw Lorem Ipsum until the web era. Type catalogs used real English samples appropriate to the font: headlines, advertisements, invoices, business cards, etc.
Here are some samples from an 1897 Inland Type Foundry catalog. Some are appropriate, some are having a little fun.
And finally a reference to antiquity, but not Cicero! King Solomon foresees the inevitable superiority of Inland Type and places an order to be filled 2000 years in the future.
Irrelevant: When I tried the modern generator, its random result was serendipitously full of vehiculo. Made me wonder what the real Latin for Jeep would be. General and purpose are both Latin-derived, but Google’s translate wants usus for purpose. Vehiculum ad usum generalem? Scribes abbreviated a lot, so an acronym would be plausible.
Polistra's Mill 