Some interesting links:
- Machines of Loving Grace offers this PDF of various Olympia typeface, including Senatorial
- Ted Munk offers the 1964 NOMAD Blue Book: Olympia Font Styles
- Vintage Technology Obsessions calls Senatorial the “robot font,” which others also do
- The SG-1 also featured the Senatorial typeface (press here)
- The “Larabiefont” was inspired by Senatorial (press here) – not a free font, but offers 20 styles or fonts
© 2018, Mark Adams. All rights reserved.
I think this is a speechwriting font, bigger so that the speaker can read it more easily. The “senatorial” would I presume refer to the guy giving the speech.
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears…” Definitely good for speeches.
I bought an SCM daisy wheel printer around 1983, before ink jet printers appeared. One of the fonts I bought, I think was called “cubic,” which I thought was approrpiate because the circle of the “o” was squareish, as in your type. I think Royal had a similar type, which they may have called “vogue.”
I just checked the operator’s manual for a Smith Corona Word Processing typewriter, and they showed this typestyle as “Tempo.”
I really like that typestyle for personal correspondence. I remember after I bought my first typewriter while in high school, I learned that I could have ordered any typestyle. I thought I only had the choice of Pica or Elite. I really regretted that I did not order script. And just a few years ago I bought a Brother Daisy Wheel at a thrift store, and couldn’t wait to get a script font, thinking it would be great for personal letter writing. Wrong! I never use it as it is too hard and slow to read. And terrible if you are trying to scan through a document for key words. Today, I prefer something easy to read for personal use, such as italic of this Olympia font. I do not like the IBM Letter Gothic, but the Smith-Corona Letter Gothic is easier to read because the letters are not as tall and narrow. As geeks will say, ‘your mileage may vary.’
Selectrics and Daisy Wheels gave people the opportunity to switch fonts, which made those machines very popular. If you don’t like a typeface, simply try another. But, as you point out, fixed-type machines could be hit or miss when it came to unique fonts.
Very nice typeface. Quite similar to Hermes Techno and Facit’s Pica Cubic.
I really like the sans typefaces having grown accustomed to the ease of readability from my broadcasting days. Sans Serif fonts are generally much easier to read than serif fonts (except on a computer where the spacing is too close and an l is indistinguishable from an I)