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Bernhard Fashion

A design of Lucian Bernhard from 1929. Elizabeth Bond wrote me this from California, when she wanted to buy a copy of Bernhard Fashion: There are four vendors on MyFonts for Bernhard Fashion! They are: Elsner+Flake, Bitstream, Linotype, and URW++. Three of them (not URW++) credit the design to Bernhard in 1929. But two of them (E&F and Linotype) claim ownership of the design! The other two (including URW++) say that Kingsley/ATF own it, ATF being the company that employed Bernhard. I determined that the character maps differ between the offerings, some considerably. Linotype's doesn't even have an @-sign or currency marks, which seem fairly necessary in today's world, even in a Display/headline font. Bitstream's @-sign is not in character with the original font at all, just plopped in from another font. The other two are complete, with appropriate (if different) choices in the modern additions. I'm not sure how an ethical choice can be made, when the type-style pre-dates computers and even the paper-trail ownership has changed hands over the years! [...] I applaud you (and McGill) for the candid (perhaps even brash?) treatment of the cloners and out-right thieves in the industry... but what can be expected of a business whose most powerful player is Bill Gates of Microsoft, with *his* history? This email summarizes the legal and ethical mess we are in with companies making up their own rules as they go.

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