Crafting Letters: The Beautiful Ludlow Typography Specimen Books c. 1958

The Ludlow Typograph Company, established in 1906, produced specimen books titled “Some Ludlow Typefaces” in editions A, B, C, and D to showcase their proprietary fonts and ornaments.

These books, particularly issue ‘D’ from circa 1958, featured designs by principal typographer R. Hunter Middleton, known for fonts like Coronet and Stencil, as well as contributions from designers such as Robert Wiebking and Hermann Zapf. The Ludlow Typograph was a hot metal typesetting system used primarily for large-type materials like newspaper headlines and posters. Despite the decline of letterpress printing in the 1960s, Ludlow’s matrices remained in use into the mid-1980s, partly due to their application in rubber stamp manufacturing. At its peak in the early 1980s, the company reported that 16,000 Ludlow machines were operational worldwide.

h/t: flashbak