Figure 1.--Here we see a cabinet card portrait of the Jordan family from Lewiston, Maine. The portrait is dated July 6, 1891 on the back. Note the stylish font.

From a very early point we notice fancy, florid script being used, mostly for the name of the studio. Often this makes the nme of the studios a little difficult to make out. We think the studios thiught that fancy scripts lent prestige to their image. We see them in use throughout the history if the 19th century classic style cabinet cards (1860s-90s). Usually it is easier to make out the studio name on the back of the card if there is back printing. The actual text for the location and some time he street address was almost always in a narrow range of fairly standard fonts. In the days before computers there was a much more limited number of fonts. But we begin to see some fancy fonts in the 1890s. A good example is the font on the previous page. We are not sure just what to call it. It looks rather like Folia Mix. Perhaps readers will know more. Here is a similar, but more cursive font. It is also dated 1981. We do not see many with this fancy fonts but we do see a few. We see this font so far in 1891 examples so we do not yet have a precise range for them. We believe that they mostly sate to the 1890s, but this needs to be confirmed.

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Created: 8:23 AM 12/18/2016
Last updated: 8:24 AM 12/18/2016