Ronaldson

On April 29, 2006, Simone Chisena uploaded to the WhatTheFont forum a scanned two-page spread from a 1970s Italian gardening book, asking for the identity of the face used on those pages. Rebecca Alaccari had been spending her daily lunch hour at that forum for a few weeks then. The face used on the pages was identified as the American classic Ronaldson Old Style, a MacKellar, Smith & Jordan metal face dating back to 1884. Ronaldson Old Style was never digitized. A conversation about it started on the forum, and the rest was a great 22-month adventure in type history, the result of which is this digital version of what was the best selling and most unique American text face of the nineteenth century, all the way into the 1920s.

The metal Ronaldson was the magnum opus of Alexander Kay, a first generation Scottish-American expert punchcutter whose r