Land Run Caption Font

Every letter in this font was traced from handwriting on glass plate negatives at the Library of Congress. Before captions were typeset, news photographers wrote them by hand directly onto the plate, and the same pen turns up again and again across the Bain News Service collection.

45 glyphs off 13 plates. The alphabet came from the captions themselves, so the letters you get are whatever words the photographer happened to write. The numerals came from the archive file numbers written in the corner of the frame. Two of the plates are Oklahoma land rush photographs, which is where the name comes from.

Caps only. Lowercase types as capitals.

One disclosure: the pen never dotted its exclamation point, so that glyph pairs a real stem from one plate with a real dot from another. Every other glyph is a single unmodified stroke.

Free for personal and commercial use under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, with Reserved Font Name “Land Run Caption”. Full provenance for every glyph, including which photograph and call number it came from, is at landrun.agency/land-run-caption