When designing the logo for this business in 1988-9, I copied pages of various styles from several typography books in my local library (Columbus, MS) and enlarged/reduced the size, cut out each letter, and placed it on graph paper so the local printer could make a plate to print our marketing materials. Not too many digital fonts available at that time.
I long ago lost the original copies, both the printer and original business have closed, and the library no longer has those books. But I'd love to know what the name is and whether this is available as a digital font.  

Strong Italic, from a 1917 book on hand lettering.

 

Digitized by the late Brian Kniceley as LHF (Letterhead Fonts) Strong Italic, but no longer available commercially from letterheadfonts.com.

Thank you, Kevin Thompson! This post was a last effort, for which I had little hope of success. I cannot tell you how happy I am to not only have it identified, but to have information that might one day lead me to a copy of the book. 

You are quite welcome.

You can actually download a PDF of the entire book from the link I provided (click on the building icon in the upper left of the screen to get the full citation details).

Here's a direct link to that view—download options are in the column on the far right.

Thanks, I did that immediately after clicking the link. I also added the link to my Contacts, emailed link and pdf to myself, added it to my external hard drive and uploaded to the cloud. I will never not have this again ;-).
(deeply personal connection to the business and one of my first forays into brand/logo/marketing - back before I realized I could have a 30+ year career in graphic design and marketing)