The Preppy Lion has an extensive colophon where I attempt to give credit for all the typefaces used in the book and other design aspects. Among these fonts are the Euler Fraktur and script fonts designed by Hermann Zapf.
I was around when the fonts first came into wide distribution (although I came into the TEX scene just a little after their release—I first started using TEX at the beginning of 1986 while I was still in high school and working part time in the UIC computing center and the fonts were completed in 1985) and I think I might have once had a copy of David Siegel’s monograph on the creation of the fonts although if so, it’s long gone now.
In any event, while trying to dig up information on the typeface to refresh my decades-old memories, I came across this article on the Stanford Digital Typography program. Somehow, in 35 years, I never managed to connect the David Siegel who digitized Zapf’s designs using Metafont¹ with the David Siegel who designed Tekton, among other architectural handwriting–inspired type designs of the 1990s.² In any event, that Stanford Digital Typography program cast a long shadow with its graduates shaping a lot of the typography world of the 80s and 90s.
And all this research? For a footnote that I ended up deleting.
- Although, while Siegel used Metafont, it is not, strictly speaking, a Meta-font. Each size was created as a separate set of outlines with no parameterization of them at all.
- Siegel seems to have largely vanished from the typography scene with little or no online presence. The same is true of his classmates Carol Twombly and Neenie Billawalla. Something in the water perhaps?