This is one of the first copies of Zion’s Watch Tower and Herald of Christ’s Presence, known today as The Watchtower. The logo appears to be custom drawn – the repeating letters W and T in “WATCH TOWER” aren’t identical. One wood type design that’s distantly related is Page’s No. 51, cut by Wells as Mansard No. 1, and digitized as Mansard. Solotype had a phototypeface named Delwin that’s likewise vaguely similar.

While “Herald of Christ’s Presence” is in caps from a generic oldstyle roman, the light italic used for the quote from Isaiah 21:11 can be identified as Lithographic Italic (Farmer, before 1867), which provided the inspiration to Club Lithographer (DJR, 2020). The line below with information about place, date and issue is set in a Celtic. A French Antique Extended, a French Clarendon, and Tendril (MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan, 1878) are combined for the publication’s title in the left column. There’s also a slab serif and a grotesque. Body copy is set in a Modern/Scotch.

This is a sample of letterhead and correspondence from Harpel’s Typograph. Designed and published by Oscar Henry Harpel in 1870, the Typograph was a comprehensive guide for letterpress printers and contains many examples of elaborate typesetting and printing techniques. The book is an example of high quality Victorian design, and a catalyst for the style in America. Such “artistic printing” was enhanced and expanded by printers such as William J. Kelly of New York and his publication The American Model Printer.

A silly postcard I made using a photograph of Ailsa Craig (Fairy Rock) in Scotland. The image is by the Detroit Photographic Company, 1905 via the Library of Congress. The text, set in LTC Law Italic, means “lazy” in Portuguese. According to Lanston, Law Italic (originally released around 1870 by MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan) was designed as an imitation of a formal style of penmanship used in legal documents.