ONE PEN WROTE "LAND RUSH, OKL."
NOW IT WRITES YOUR HEADLINES.
In the early years of the last century, somebody at a New York picture agency captioned glass plate negatives in pen. One of them reads Land Rush, Okl. We cut out every letter that pen made and traced it into a font you can install. 45 letters and marks. Every one from a real stroke. Free.
We pulled the master scans, cut out every handwritten letter, and traced them into a working typeface. Nothing redrawn, nothing smoothed. If a letter wobbles, a real hand wobbled first, more than a century ago.
Where it comes from
Bain News Service was one of the first picture agencies in America. Somebody there captioned the glass negatives in pen, and the Library of Congress holds the plates today with no known restrictions on publication. One is captioned Land Rush, Okl. Another reads Land Office, Okl.
Here is the part a marketing page would leave out. The first land run was April 22, 1889, and this pen was nowhere near it. Bain News Service did not exist until about 1898. The catalog records no date at all for the two Oklahoma plates, and the plates in this set that do carry dates run from about 1910 to 1920. The hand that captioned them was writing about the country the run made, not the day it happened. We could have printed 1889 on this page. It would have sold better. It would also be wrong.
13 negatives. One pen. Two of those plates were shot in Oklahoma, and they gave us 13 of the 45 letters. Another 18 came from Oklahoma people and one Oklahoma battleship, photographed in New York and places that were not Oklahoma. Thirteen more came from a zeppelin, a Christmas tree, the Queen Mary, and a postman. The last one is the exclamation point, and it came from two plates at once.
A pen and thirteen plates made an identity nobody planned. Making one on purpose is the job we charge for.
03 Background subtracted · threshold
Repeat 45 times.
Every letter, accounted for
Thirteen negatives. Forty five letters. Every one traced, none redrawn. Hover a plate to see the hand; every card links to its Library of Congress record.
The exclamation point is the one assembly. Stem from the Dore plate, dot from the Beeler plate, same pen.
Source scans: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Bain Collection, no known restrictions on publication. Full item numbers ride inside the pack. Set a headline in it, then send us what you make.
Nobody writes an ampersand for fun.
Every mark in this font exists because some caption needed it. The parentheses exist because a governor needed his state clarified. The quotes exist because a ship had a name. The apostrophe exists because a postman owned a Christmas.
The numbers are file numbers.
The letters came from what the photograph was of. The digits came from where the archive put it. "483-6" was written in the corner of the Land Rush plate, and that is your 4, your 8, your 3, your 6, and your hyphen.
The pen never dotted its exclamation point.
One more confession. The pen never dotted its exclamation point. Ours pairs a real stem from the Dore plate with a real dot from the Beeler plate. Same pen, two plates. That is the only assembly in the font, and the ledger marks it.
Free to take.
Take the fontFree. No email. Open license, use it commercially.
Install the desktop files on your machine. Drop the web file on your site. The specimen sheet has the whole story and the source list, letter by letter.
We build one of these every few months, and once a month we send one page on what a website should cost, why some businesses show up on the map and others do not, and what we shipped. Unsubscribe any time, keep the font forever. We do not sell your address and we do not hand it to anybody.
You are on. First Tuesday of the month, one page, nothing else.
Free for personal and commercial use under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
Write your own caption.
This is the actual negative. Type anything and it lands in the sky, in the same hand, in the same spot the archivist used. Take the picture, it is yours.
Photograph: Library of Congress, Bain Collection, ggbain.02286. Public domain. Yours to use.
It gets more like itself as it gets bigger.
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THE FASTEST GOT THE BEST GROUND. THAT IS THE WHOLE STORY OF THE RUN, AND IT IS THE WHOLE STORY OF SEARCH. A PARAGRAPH SET IN A CAPS ONLY DISPLAY FACE READS LIKE THIS, AND NOBODY FINISHES IT.
THE FASTEST GOT THE BEST GROUND.
That is the whole story of the run, and it is the whole story of search. Set the headline in Land Run Caption and let a working text face carry the paragraph underneath it.
Set a headline in it. Set the paragraph in something else.
What's in the pack
License question, or a project the font belongs on? Ask us directly.
Not a designer? This one is for you.
Fonts are designer bait, we know it. If you run a business, the free page worth your time is the one that keeps website money from going sideways: five questions to ask before you pay anyone, with the right answers spelled out.
Get the five questions, one pageThe font is free and it stays free. If you want the rest of it built, the site, the brand, the software underneath, that is the part we charge for.
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ground you want.
Run a business in Oklahoma City? Fonts are the side of the desk. The other side is websites, local search, and branding for owners in the metro. Prices are public, no call required.