Description
Elegante originated as Sensation at the German Hoffmeister foundry in 1913. Some time later is was produced in the U.S. by Baltotype (with or without permission), and it is these matrices that we have. In American Metal Typefaces Mac McGrew describes it as a recutting, but that is not accurate—the mats are electrodeposited, and therefore exact duplicates of the original. Elegante has a number of specials including guillamets, a curlicue interpoint (no that’s not an @ sign) and what is surely the most useless logotype in history: Etc, capitalized, no less. While the bulk of the font is on 36pt body, the descenders are cast on 42 to avoid kerns.
An interesting if relatively inconsequential detail about this casting: The matrices are stamped 36 for the point size, and 106 for Balto’s proprietary face number. We commenced casting and all was well until we got to the first descender, the lowercase P. Characters in a font are normally cast in order widest to narrowest, and this was number 51 of 84 on the list. We found that the descender was seriously off the body–kerned. Thus we faced the choice of dumping a week’s work and starting over on 42 point, or casting only the descenders on that size, which would require the use of 6pt fillers under the remainder of any line containing descenders. (Casting those characters with such a big fragile kern was not considered a viable option.) Given that this face would normally be composed in small amounts–a line or two–I made the executive decision that a little extra work at your end was better than a lot of extra work at ours. We also have Balto’s matrices for this in 24 and 30. Their 1949 catalog shows it in nine (9) sizes, 10 through 42. However, 36pt is NOT shown, indicating that they cast all characters on 42.
