Gothic Open Shaded is a deceptively simple face. An outlined sans-serif (or gothic) with a shadow. Of course, the devil's in the details. Start comparing the outline of the shadow to the outline of the inset letterform, and you will begin to notice a series of surprising and inexplicable discrepancies. Just take a look at the bottom right terminals of the ampersand. Now that's wood type!
Like Fatboy, Gothic Open Shaded was first seen in George Nesbitt’s First Premium Wood Types, Cut by Machinery (1838). This cut of Gothic Open Shaded most closely matches a design first cut by Young & Morgans between 1876–1880. Once Morgans & Wilcox was acquired by Hamilton Manufacturing Co. (1897), they listed the face as No. 3238.
The font includes two weights: regular and distressed. The regular weight is a clean, precise redraw which captures the contours of the original wood type. The distressed weight is a rendering of the the textures of the letterpress proof itself, warts and all. The distressed weight features alternate characters with extra dings and blemishes, set as the lowercase keyboard characters.
WTR Gothic Open Shaded was drawn from 15.5-line (186 point) wood type, and is best used at larger sizes. The characters pictured above are the historically accurate glyphs represented in this font.
Gothic Open Shaded is available on Typekit for web use.
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