A drawing from 1932 for the G, O, Q, C and D of Gill Sans. Via Flickr.
You'll notice from my banner that I'm a big Gill Sans fan. This is the font that kick-started my education in and fascination with typography - it was the first font that, as a student, I took time to read up on, allowing me to put a name (and a history) to the lettering I'd seen around all my life but which now appeared to be dying out. From government posters to the sides of steam locomotives, here was a font that radiated authority and a certain type of English grandeur in caps, but which could also be surprisingly intimate and almost fun when blocks of text were set in smaller point sizes (when first using Apple Macs I had a thing for making tiny note cards and super-miniature posters using it).
The classic Jan Tschichold-redesigned Penguin Books covers are where Gill Sans really comes into its own. Small, portable, made of cheap mass-produced materials, and - crucially - succinctly direct. The above is one of my most prized possessions, a Penguin first edition of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The whole package - type, materials, novel - is postwar Britain in a nutshell.
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