TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Wed Nov 20 12:07:25 EST 2024

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LUC DEVROYE


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Columbia, Buffalo, Kolonial, Post Oldstyle Roman

Andrzej Tomaszewski tells sketches the history of the Columbia typeface in this Polish site.

E.J. Kitson, the graphic designer of the weekly magazine Saturday Evening Post in Philadelphia, designed a characteristic typeface with wavy edges, representing the fashionable Arts & Crafts movement. The typeface rapidly gained popularity and was produced by several typefoundries in the USA and Europe. Originally used in the Saturday Evening Post vignette and later in the weekly titles, it was cast at American Type Founders in the form of two variants---Post Oldstyle Roman No. 1 and No. 2. Then the typeface went to Boston, where the Hansen Type Foundry (founded by Norwegian H.C. Hansen, previously an employee of Dickinson's typefoundry in the same city) introduced a font called Buffalo in 1902 or slightly earlier. The typeface family also had a poster variation, Buffalo Poster. In the early 1970s, Buffalo found its way to the New York-based Photo-Lettering Inc.

The typeface was cast in the first decade of the 20th century under various names, e.g., at Renault as Cleveland, by Societa Augusta as Franklin, and by Stevens as Nelson Old Style. In 1904, Lettergieterij Amsterdam (formerly Nicolaas Tetterode) made its own version of Buffalo and offered it under the name Columbia. About the same time, the German adaptation of the typeface was created under the name of Kolonial. The fonts were produced by Wilhelm Woellmer's Schriftgiesserei in Berlin. This version of the typeface was cast in Warsaw: under the original name of Kolonial by Stanislaw Jeaynski and as Columbia (Columbia) by Jan Idzkowski. Even in the catalog from 1954, Odlewnia Fontek PP (the nationalized company of J. Idzkowski i S-ka) offered printing houses with fonts from Colombia.

A large part of the matrices from both Polish foundries has been preserved in the collection of the Book Art Museum in Lodz: Columbia in seventeen sizes (degrees of writing of a given type) and one set of the Kolonial typeface from Jezynski's typefoundry.

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Columbia, Buffalo, Kolonial, Post Oldstyle Roman
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INTERNAL LINKS
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Luc Devroye ⦿ School of Computer Science ⦿ McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 ⦿ lucdevroye@gmail.com ⦿ https://luc.devroye.org ⦿ https://luc.devroye.org/fonts.html