Forty-five glyphs traced letter by letter from handwritten captions on Bain News Service glass-plate negatives held at the Library of Congress, anchored by two Oklahoma plates captioned "Land Rush, Okl." and "Land Office, Okl." The catalog records no date for the two anchors; the dated plates in the set run from about 1910 to 1920. Nothing invented, nothing redrawn. If a letter looks shaky, that is because a real hand shook a little writing it more than a century ago.
The Bain News Service, America's first news picture agency, captioned its glass negatives by hand in pen. The Library of Congress holds the collection with no known restrictions on publication. Every glyph in this font is traced from one of nine negatives; eleven glyphs come straight off the two land run plates.
| Negative | Caption | Gives |
|---|---|---|
| Land Rush, Okl. Anchor LOC ggbain.02286 | "LaNdRush. OKL." + "483-6" | L N O R 3 4 6 8 - |
| Land Office, Okl. Anchor LOC ggbain.02285 | "LANdOFFice. OKL." + "483-5" | F K 5 , |
| USS Oklahoma LOC ggbain.20872 | "OKLAHOMA" + "3730-13" | A H M 0 1 7 |
| Pat J. Dore of Oklahoma LOC ggbain.07023 | five lines on the man who slugged several Taft men in the Coliseum, ending "TO-DAY!" | B C J P S U ! |
| Oklahoma delegation LOC ggbain.10576 | "OKLA. DEL." | D |
| Sen. Beeler and party LOC ggbain.07109 | "SEN. BEELER. E.G. PRIESTLEY, OKLA." | . |
| Gov. R.L. Williams (Okla) LOC ggbain.17926 | "GOV. R.L. WILLIAMS (OKLA)" | G V W ( ) |
| Zeppelin Air Ship LOC ggbain.01956 | "ZEPPELIN AIR SHIP" + "411-9" | E I Z 9 |
| Xmas Tree LOC ggbain.11618 | "XMAS TREE" + "2526-10" | T X 2 |
| Queen Mary LOC ggbain.31282 | "QUEEN MARY" + "5299-5" | Q Y |
| Launch of "Queen Mary" LOC ggbain.10459 | the quote marks around "QUEEN MARY" | " |
| Mr. & Mrs. Borden Harriman LOC ggbain.07127 | "MR & MRS BORDEN HARRIMAN" | & |
| The Postman's Xmas LOC ggbain.08872 | "THE POSTMAN'S XMAS" | ' |
Caps only; lowercase types as capitals. Letters, numbers, and the working punctuation: period, comma, hyphen, exclamation, apostrophe, quotes, ampersand, parentheses. One honest confession: the pen never dotted its exclamation point, so ours pairs the real stem from the Dore plate with the real dot from the Beeler plate. Same pen, two plates. It is a display face: headlines, labels, dates, posters, packaging, anything that wants to look staked in the dirt. Pair it with a quiet serif for body text.
Licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1: free for personal and commercial use, embed it, print it, ship it. Just don't resell the files on their own.
A free download from Land Run Marketing, Oklahoma City · landrun.agency · Source scans: Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Bain Collection, no known restrictions on publication.