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Lewis Buddy III

Magazine artist and letterer, b. 1872, d. 1941. He designed Roycroft and Tabard (which appeared, e.g., in the 1912 ATF Specimen book). Tabard was digitized by Nick Curtis in 2006 as Gandy Dancer NF.

Mac McGrew on Roycroft: Roycroft was one of the most popular of a number of rugged typefaces used around the turn of the century, when printing with an antique appearance was in vogue. It was inspired by lettering used by the Saturday Evening Post, then a popular weekly magazine, and has been credited to Lewis Buddy, a former Post artist and letterer, but ATF says it was designed "partly" by Morris Benton, about 1898. Gerry Powell, director of typographic design for ATF in the 1940s, says, "Roycroft was first known as Buddy, changed when it was adopted by Elbert Hubbard for the Roycroft Press." Henry L. Bullen, ATF librarian and historian, says, "The first font of type to be made from matrices directly engraved on the Benton machine was 24-point Roycroft. October 4, 1900." While the machine was originally designed in 1884 to cut punches rather than matrices, it is doubtful that no fonts of mats were cut before 1900. Roycroft is also said to be the first typeface for which the large size of 120-point was engraved in type metal, with matrices made by electrotyping. Many typefaces of the day had a number of alternate characters. For this face. ATF gave specific instructions for their intended use: "M with the short vertex, in words the letters of which are open; R with the long tail, as a final letter in all-cap words; the wide h, m, and n, as a final letter only; t with the swash tail, as a final letter but not too frequently; u with the descending stroke, in words having no descending letters; ct ligature, wherever possible; the long s and its combinations, in antique work." Roycroft Open was cut in 1902, probably from the same patterns as the parent face. Roycroft Tinted is a very unusual face, in which the typeface is engraved with the equivalent of a halftone screen of about 25 percent tone value, with a black shadow on the right side; this typeface was cut by the Dickinson Type Foundry branch of ATF in Boston, and includes the same special characters as Roycroft. Compare Post Oldstyle.

For a digital revival of Roycroft, see Croft (2018, Brian J. Bonislawsky and Jim Lyles).

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Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Nick Curtis ⦿ Morris Fuller Benton ⦿ Arts and Crafts Movement ⦿