The fourth in a series of visual excerpts from the out-of-print book 和英文字レタリング (Japanese and English Lettering) by Tsunetoshi Hurusawa (古沢恒敏), a collection of assorted lettering styles culled from history.

Originally published in 1978, the book is a great study of lettering used by typical “fancy”/ファンシー businesses — mainly cafés, “snack bars”, cake shops, and assorted 1950s-1990s service-oriented businesses. A number of the lettering styles within the book became the blueprints for these types of businesses’ lettering.

『和英文字レタリング』 is a great compendium of work that helps explain much of the Tokyo letterscape of recent history. This visual series will continue in weekly installments.

The third in a series of visual excerpts from the out-of-print book 和英文字レタリング (Japanese and English Lettering) by Tsunetoshi Hurusawa (古沢恒敏), a collection of assorted lettering styles culled from history.

Originally published in 1978, the book is a great study of lettering used by typical “fancy”/ファンシー businesses — mainly cafés, “snack bars”, cake shops, and assorted 1950s-1990s service-oriented businesses. A number of the lettering styles within the book became the blueprints for these types of businesses’ lettering.

『和英文字レタリング』 is a great compendium of work that helps explain much of the Tokyo letterscape of recent history. This visual series will continue in weekly installments.

The second in a series of visual excerpts from the out-of-print book 和英文字レタリング (Japanese and English Lettering) by Tsunetoshi Hurusawa (古沢恒敏), a collection of assorted lettering styles culled from history.

Originally published in 1978, the book is a great study of lettering used by typical “fancy”/ファンシー businesses — mainly cafés, “snack bars”, cake shops, and assorted 1950s-1990s service-oriented businesses. A number of the lettering styles within the book became the blueprints for these types of businesses’ lettering.

『和英文字レタリング』 is a great compendium of work that helps explain much of the Tokyo letterscape of recent history. This visual series will continue in weekly installments.

The first in a series of visual excerpts from the out-of-print book 『和英文字レタリング』 (Japanese and English Lettering) by Tsunetoshi Furusawa (古沢恒敏), a collection of assorted lettering styles culled from history.

Originally published in 1978, the book is a great study of lettering used by typical “fancy”/ファンシー businesses — mainly cafés, “snack bars”, cake shops, and assorted 1950s-1990s service-oriented businesses. A number of the lettering styles within the book became the blueprints for these types of businesses’ lettering.

Interestingly, the book includes a number of alphabets redrawn from American and European typefaces with roots that lie in assorted schools of hand lettering. For example, the typeface Cooper Black is redrawn in the book. That typeface was originally a boisterous lettering style with roots in the Chicago advertising industry and has precursors in hand-rendered by lettering artists and type designers such as Oswald Cooper (who later formalized the style in his Cooper family of typefaces), Fred Goudy (who knocked off Cooper with his inferior Goudy Heavyface), and William Addison Dwiggins (who was busy making his own original letterforms before saying, “To hell with Chicago winters!” and moved east to Massachusetts).

『和英文字レタリング』 is a great compendium of work that helps explain much of the Tokyo letterscape of recent history. This visual series will continue in weekly installments.