The pdf is, in my opinion, a highly collectable item of ephemera.
Viewed in Adobe Reader, choosing File Properties… Fonts shows that characters from seven fonts are used in the document.
By using copy and paste from the pdf to WordPad I was able to identify which font was used for each piece of text. I have only found five of the fonts in this way.
I noticed in particular the use of alternate characters in BickhamScriptPro-Regular.
Here is a link to the Glyph Complement pdf of the font.
The New York Public Library has online an extensive collection of American sheet music covering the years from 1890 thru 1911. I used that as a basis for a set of fonts.
While the detailed images are copies of copies and somewhat faded, the fonts show up very clearly and reflect the time period. Art nouveau and deco are widely used but of course anything goes…
That’s a nice font. Images for 33 songs, of which songs I knew ten at most, maybe just eight or nine. Some of them used in later movies, featured as songs or just in the background in scenes in period movies. I suppose that, then as now, some songs were more popular and enduring than others.
There are links to items from the years 1854, 1878, and for each of the years from 1890 to 1923.
There are lots of examples of title pages using lettering with facilities for displaying enlarged images and facilities for looking at the music and lyrics as well.
The page linked above was the first link on the following page.
Yup. That was my source. I put together 5 fonts from 1890 - 1911 and got tired of all the effort needed to clean them up. The fonts turned out very big (1-2mb). That was the extent of my journey in ephemera.
Was interesting to see what kind of music was being written and played in Dave’s childhood. He doesn’t remember them all either.
