Prescription Takes

Via the Typograp.her newsletter I discovered an amazing collection of type catalogs from American Type Founders. I love looking at old type catalogs, but I had never looked at one for lead type before and was struck by how all the things that we now do in Illustrator (and when I started my career, shot on a stat camera) were made in lead or brass and locked up with lead type for printing. As I was looking through the catalog from 1897, I ran across what they called Recipe Marks. It was the familiar ℞ from pharmacy signs, but why were they calling them Recipe Marks? It turns out recipe means take, or to take in latin. The symbol we now call a Prescription Take is used to say, “I want the patient to take the following....”

(The next page was full of nautical signal flags which seems awfully niche for a mass produced product even for 1897.)

Anyway, to read more about how the Prescription Take is used, head on over to the Wikipedia page on Prescriptions.

Blackletter for the Present

I subscribe to Robin Rendle’s newsletter all about typefaces and fonts (and you should too) and this week he was talking about blackletter type that has been rethought to work for modern readers. The whole newsletter is great, but what caught my eye and seemed worth sharing here was the product page for the typeface Elfreth over at JTD Type. The research and choices they made as they were designing Elfreth to make sure it feels contemporary rather than a throwback to traditional blackletter type are really interesting, and it is fun to see their research and inspiration.