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I have come across a certain lively style of hand lettering on some old postcards that interests me. I have only two examples:

The full images can be seen here and here.

The images are from Copenhagen in Denmark and dates back to around 1900-1910. The texts are clearly handwritten. Perhaps etched in some way and added to the images sometime during development of the images.

Although the letters look a little different in the two examples and are written in both regular and oblique style, they seem to follow the same principle. The letters have different baseline and height, but in a consistent way.

I'm interested in learning more about this "font". I doubt it has a proper name, but it would be nice to see more examples. I've searched for "art nouveau", "art deco", "jugend" and more, but have been unsuccessful in finding similar handwriting.

Ideally I would like to find examples of all letters and numerals written in this style so I can recreate it digitally.

Edit

After posting this question I actually managed to find the name of the publisher of those old postcards (Fotografisk Forlag which means Photographical Publisher in English). That enabled me to find a lot of images of postcards from the same series. I've cut out the texts, cleaned them up and gathered them here:

The lettering is a bit inconsistent and in varying quality, but there is still a clear pattern.

So now I actually have examples of all numerals and letters except Q, W, Z and Å (which didn't exist at the time the postcards were printed anyway).

However, I'm still interested in:

  • Knowing if this style of lettering has a name.
  • Seeing other examples of similar writing from that period.
  • Finding the missing letters Q, W, Z and Å (and other characters).
  • Finding a digital font in similar style.
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  • I think it's more about manual writing rather than a font. I feel each letter in each word is styled according to adjacent letters. Like which combination of style looks better. So it's sort of calligraphy. If you see A in norrebrogAde, it is different from A in kobenhAVn, maybe to make it look beautiful with V?
    – Vikas
    Commented Apr 2, 2021 at 16:10
  • @Vikas, yes it is manual and I see the oblique A is a mirrored version of the regular A. But I still believe the lettering follows a strict set of rules. The pen moves in the same pattern, O has "normal" height, A extends below, R extends both below and above etc. Might be the personal style of the photographer, but hard to believe it wasn't a style that was somehow "in fashion" at the time.
    – Wolff
    Commented Apr 2, 2021 at 16:20
  • @Wolff I feel like you have enough examples, if you have any skill with creating fonts (or know someone who does), you could possibly create your own font?
    – Alith7
    Commented Apr 5, 2021 at 18:27
  • I asked in a different group, and the best they came up with so far is this one: myfonts.com/fonts/chank/chauncy-pro?tab=individualStyles
    – Alith7
    Commented Apr 7, 2021 at 12:50
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    @Vikki, yes haha. They had another logic back then.
    – Wolff
    Commented Dec 29, 2021 at 14:45

1 Answer 1

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I found a font (not free though) that isn't similar, but might help you get started.

enter image description here

https://www.1001fonts.com/kg-sunny-afternoon-font.html

Source: 1001 fonts

Further, if you spend some time searching online articles, searching for handwritten (and turning on uppercase preview) font sites, you might find some luck. You may find a font that is quite similar and then you'll have the name of a font that you can ask about. So maybe more chances of knowing what that type of font is called.

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  • I don't think this looks very similar. Many differences. The vertical lines in this font are jumping around and aren't parallel. The I and J has serifs. All letters have the same height and baseline. B, D and R are closed, in my examples they have a characteristic opening in the top. This font tries to look "handmade" where the font I'm looking is of course handmade, but tries too look more consistent.
    – Wolff
    Commented Apr 4, 2021 at 14:45

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