Hayes Lowe
More on dating by typefaces.
Mon Feb 12 12:54:56 2001


A while back, we had a discussion here (and some discussion offline via email) about sans serif typefaces, and how the antique world uses this as a cutoff point. That is, if an item has sans serif typeface, it cannot be 19th Century...this is because sans serif typefaces were not invented until after the turn of the 20th Century (and are accredited to the Baus Haus design house in Germany).

Well, the more that I look into this, the more that I find that to be complete bunk!

One person, knowledgeable in the area of blacksmithing wrote me that while this may be true in the world of paper, blacksmiths had to handcarve their lettering stamps. In doing so, it would be much too time consuming to do the serifs. O.K., makes sense. So was this the real origin of sans serif typefaces?

I have now found examples of American printed paper items from 1861-1867 using sans serif typefaces! If you are interested, go to this address: http://www.bradsheff.com/postal/search.cgi?item=1596.

There you will see a Civil War era envelope. It has an 1861-1867 U.S. stamp on it. Notice that both the postmark and the printed logo use sans serif typeface! And that is just one of the many examples that I have found that definitively date to that era.

Now I know that to some of you this sounds like nit picking detail...but it is very important to Civil War era collectors! There's no telling how many items have been "outed" as fakes or repros based on the this one characteristic alone...now we see that it is a baseless methodology.

• type faces — Alan J. Pitts, Tue Feb 13 08:06
• typefaces — Robert Sims, Tue Feb 13 23:20
• Matching typefaces. — Hayes Lowe, Tue Feb 13 09:15