Lettering collection
This catalog records four private studies from The Manual of Monumental Lettering. It distinguishes characters visible in the source from characters constructed or aliased during font development. The files and source-comparison images remain private pending rights review; no downloadable or fabrication-ready font is offered here.
Source map and coverage
Section titled “Source map and coverage”| Study | Source location | Recorded coverage |
|---|---|---|
| Wyckoff Colonial | PDF p.146 / printed p.138, upper plate; J. W. Wyckoff credited | 36 traced capital/numeral designs. The private revision also contains constructed punctuation and lowercase-to-capital aliases, documented separately. |
| Rustic Letters | PDF p.156 / printed p.148, upper plate; designer uncredited | A–Z and period from the plate; constructed space. No lowercase or figures. |
| Old Style Ornament | PDF p.153 / printed p.145, lower plate; designer uncredited | A–Z, a–z, 0–9, ampersand, period, comma, semicolon, exclamation and question marks; constructed space. |
| Square Block Letters | PDF p.155 / printed p.147, lower plate; designer uncredited | A–Z, a–z, 0–9 and the same six punctuation characters; constructed space. |
The two latest studies use the captions Old Style Ornament and Square Block Letters visible on the scanned plates. Earlier inventory names “Old Style Condensed” and “Full-face Block” did not match those captions and have been corrected in this public catalog.
What the new specimens establish
Section titled “What the new specimens establish”The October 2026 private specimens compare every traced character with its source row. Each new font has 69 Unicode mappings: 68 plate characters plus space. A visible missing-character frame is an interface aid, not an invented historical letter. Colon, apostrophe, hyphen and accented letters are not supplied.
Font-table, advance-width and vertical-bound checks passed. FreeType rendered every supplied nonspace character at 24, 48, 96 and 140 pixels; eleven selected pair-gap checks found no geometric collisions. Those checks establish usable review files, not finished optical spacing. Neither new font has kerning or validation in engraving, stencil or CAD software.
Reading a reconstruction critically
Section titled “Reading a reconstruction critically”Tracing and cleanup change small marks. Baseline irregularities and some source-print cracks remain, notably in the Square Block K. The comparison sheets make those differences visible; they are not claims of an exact facsimile or evidence that the shapes can be fabricated at any size. The next design decisions concern spacing, counter preservation and which historical irregularities to retain.
Source and editorial credit
Section titled “Source and editorial credit”LM publication record: The Manual of Monumental Lettering, Monumental News, Madison, Wisconsin. Columbia University original, Google digitization, HathiTrust identifier nnc1.0036694738. Exact scan edition and reuse terms remain unresolved. The two inspected lower plates do not name their designers.
This is an AI-assisted editorial catalog of private reconstruction work. Font metadata or an embedding flag does not supply a distribution license. The underlying scan and font binaries are excluded from the website.