Metallurgica Italo Ottinetti
Contributed by Riccardo Sartori
on Oct 3rd, 2021.
Photo: Riccardo Sartori. License: All Rights Reserved.
The sign outside a metallurgical company in Northern Italy, near Lake Maggiore.
Founded just over a century ago, in 1920, it is still in operation, even though they now use a far less interesting serif, paired with Copperplate Gothic, for their logo.
The typeface looked familiar and, after a bit of search, I thought it was a painted sign inspired by Kalligraphia, but it turned out that Caslon’s Caligraph (1899; a.k.a. Berthier & Durey’s Danoises, before 1905) matched the differences.
Photo: Riccardo Sartori. License: CC BY.
2 Comments on “Metallurgica Italo Ottinetti”
I’ve looked a little deeper into Kalligraphia and this narrower variant with less ornate capitals and simpler ascenders. While the exact origin and date is not entirely clear to me, I found that Stempel carried this design as Reklame-Kursiv and presented it as a patented original design in a 1918 specimen. Stempel also carried a related lighter design under the name Merkur. Merkur was likewise presented as a patented original design, and also cast by Caslon (as Belgravia).
I have updated our typeface page including the sample, now with Reklame-Kursiv as the (provisional) canonical name.
Here’s a visual comparison of Kalligraphia (top, using’s URW digitization named Kelvin) and Reklame-Kursiv (from Stempel’s c.1925 Hauptprobe). In addition to the less swashy caps, note the simplified ascenders (here for h and d) and the narrower width of the latter: