Albertus Extra Bold origin

[Mike F]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

I am trying to find the origin of Albertus Extra Bold. There are a few digital fonts out there - most of dubious origian. I and a friend with much more reference material find no such critter in metal up through photolettering. Jaspert reveals that several variants of the original Albertus and Italic were added over the years, but no Extra Bold.

The earliest appearance I can find is a Font Company (defunct) font. Most of their fonts were apparently made for them by URW using Ikarus. Was URW in the habit of adding extrapolated weights to font families using Ikarus?
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Also, there was, it seems, an Albertus Extra Bold built into early HP Laserjet printers, but where did that come from?

The frustrating thing is that there are two very different "models" of Albertus Extra Bold that various companies followed. One was used by Font Company (via URW it seems) and Miles (gobbled up by Agfa). The other was used by Fontbank and Brendel. None of these companies (not including URW) created anything original so whose Albertus Extra Bold were they copying, why two different styles and, the thing I'm trying to deduce, which model came first and who designed it?

Does anyone have a sizeable showing (1/2 page at least) of an Albertus Extra Bold?

[Si_Daniels]

I always thought Albertus was a Monotype trademark, so maybe you could ask them. I'm sure they could let you know if there are Extra Bold drawings at Salfords, and if so these would be the "original" source.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albertus_%28typeface%29

[Mike F]

Done. Thanks for the suggestion, Simon.

[will powers]

On the Brendel version:

In 1993 I received a review copy of a CD called "SERIALS TYPECOLLECTION," which was how the Brendel types were marketed in the USA at that time. The marketer was B & P Graphics from LaGrange, Illinois.

On that CD Albertus was named "Adelon". There are roman and italic, in Light, Regular, Medium, Demi Bold, Bold, and (yes!) Extra Bold.

I have no idea what the source material was. The poster that came with the CD says the fonts were "digitized using the latest IKARUS technology." & I don't know much about Brendel and these types he re-worked and marketed. Or about B & P. I think there was a lawsuit. I saw no good in these faces. No ligatures, for one thing.

But I could make a showing of Adelon Extra Bold.

powers

[Dan Gayle]

>>Was URW in the habit of adding extrapolated weights to font families using Ikarus?

You kidding? I have a set of URW fonts that came with Freehand 8, and practically every one of them was a piece o' interpolated garbagé. Out of 40 cuts of a single typeface family, I would venture to say that maybe 8 were originals. Perhaps more or less, but the vast majority are interpolations.

[Mark Simonson]

There were at least a few display film font versions of Albertus that included bolder weights, sometimes called "Albertus", sometimes not. For example, Headliners International had a family called Neo-Albertus with four weights from Light to Extra Bold. I doubt any of them were licensed or sanctioned by Monotype, as such things rarely were back in the film font days.

[Mike F]

Thanks for all that info guys.

So, Mark, I mentioned that the existing digital version of AlbertusXB seemed to follow two very different models. Here's what I mean:

I should clarify that what are actually shown in my image are AdelonXB - with Anthony being very similar, but not exactly the same - and Miles' AlbertusXB - with the Font Company's version being quite similar.

My question to you is which of the two models, if either, do you see in those earlier AlbertusXB film fonts? I just took a look back at the many ID requests on What The Font that turned out to be AlbertusXB and most were made by a film or digital font that looked like the Miles/Font Co. model.