Is there a closer match?

[Alfred]

The attached samples look very similar to the commercial font Cloister Black and Dieter Steffmann's free font Old London, but the /W doesn't have the thin verticals which are evident in those fonts, and the /y has a more extravagant tail. Is a closer match available anywhere?

[MikeW]

I get a better sample to match the "County Press" from their web site banner...

I cannot find an exact match to all the characters. Have you tried writing the news paper and asking?

[Alfred]

I get a better sample to match the "County Press" from their web site banner...

I guess it all depends on your definition of "better", Mike! I got those images from a free PDF sample from their archive: the web site banner doesn't have those scanning artefacts, but the outlines seem to be softened up somewhat.

I cannot find an exact match to all the characters. Have you tried writing the news paper and asking?

I was actually asking on behalf of someone who lives on the Isle of Wight. It turns out that he has a couple of friends working for the publisher and he's planning to give them a call tomorrow, so I'll wait and see what transpires.

Thanks for your efforts.

[MikeW]

Better, to me, means I do not need to manipulate the image. The web site is quite clear, solid black on a white background, for the characters comprising the phrase I indicated.

When I cannot get a match, the route I usually take is to email the publisher, author, or whatever. Sometimes I do not get a response, sometimes I told off for asking. Sometimes I actually get a meaningful response...

It may have been letraset or some other transfer at one point in time. If so, there may not be an exact font match. I hope it is a font.

[Alfred]

Better, to me, means I do not need to manipulate the image.

When I took partial screenshots from the PDF and tried to feed those images to 'What Font Is', it smudged up most of the glyphs and ran them together. So I adjusted the gamma from 1.0 to 2.5 (hence the funny file names!) and tried again; this time it distinguished easily between foreground and background, offering up alternatives which included a number of Cloister Black and Old London lookalikes, but nothing closer than those. Then I posted here, and you know the rest.

[Alfred]

I was actually asking on behalf of someone who lives on the Isle of Wight. It turns out that he has a couple of friends working for the publisher and he's planning to give them a call tomorrow, so I'll wait and see what transpires.

The Editor of the newspaper has apparently explained that the font is "a bespoke piece of type from days of yore", with Cloister as its origins. No great surprises there!