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.