Typography Question
1 o'clock, October 22, 2003
Can anyone point me to some information on what typefaces were commonly used in popular fiction and/or pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s? (For the body text, that is, not the covers.) I could try to find some representative sample pages, but I’m not optimistic about my ability to recognize typefaces, or identify anachronisms.
There's a book called PULPS that you can get at most any library, that has some actual sample layouts and things from pulp magazines of the day. I'll try and hunt out my copy and be more complete in my reference information, but that should pull it up on a search.
There's also a bunch of web resources for this. There's the Pulp Companion at http://thepulp.net/PulpCompanion/0210/startling.html, which has a freeware pulp typeface for headlines and such and you might also look at http://www.fontdiner.com/, but I think they want bucks for those.