The hardest working font in Manhattan – Aresluna

The hardest working font in Manhattan

In 2007, on my first trip to New York City, I grabbed a brand-new DSLR camera and photographed all the fonts I was supposed to love. I admired American Typewriter in all of the I<br>But there was one font I didn’t even notice, even though it was everywhere around me.

Last year in New York, I walked over 100 miles and took thousands of photos of one and one font only.

The font’s name is Gorton.

It’s hard to believe today that there was a time before I knew of Gorton and all its quirks and mysteries. The first time I realized the font even existed was some time in 2017, when I was researching for my book about the history of typing.

Many keyboards, especially older ones, sported a particular distinctive font on their keycaps. It was unusually square in proportions, and a weird mélange of “mechanical” and “childish.”

The more I looked at it, the more I realized how bizarre and amateurish it was. The G always felt like it was about to roll away on its side. There was a goofy wavy hook sticking out of Q. P and R were often too wide. & and @ symbols would be laughed away in a type crit, and the endings of C felt like grabbing something next to it – a beginning of a ligature that never came.

The strangeness extended to the digits. There was a top-flatted 3 resembling common Cyrillic styling, 7 sloping down in a unique way, a very geometric 4, an unusual – perhaps even naïve – symmetry between 6 and 9, and a conflation of O with 0 that would be a fireable offense elsewhere.

Looking at just a few keyboards, it was also obvious that it wasn’t just one rigid font. There were always variations, sometimes even on one keyboard. 0 came square, dotted, or slashed. The usually very narrow letter I sometimes sported serifs. The R and the 6 moved their middles higher or lower. There also seemed to be a narrower version of the font, deployed when a keycap needed a word and not just a letter. (Lowercase letters existed too, but not very often.)

My first thought was: What a mess. Is this how “grotesque” fonts got their name?

Then, the second thought: I kind of like it.

The most distinctive letterforms of Gorton (Press a key!)

But what font was it? What The Font website posited TT Rounds, Identifont suggested it could be Divulge, my early guess was DIN Rounded or something related to road signage. Whatever it was, a flat R clearly separated it from Helvetica, and the shapes were not as round as even the un-rounded Gotham’s.

A few places for keyboard nerds referred to the font as “Gorton,” but that phrase yielded zero results anywhere I typically looked for fonts I could download and install.

I originally thought this had to do with how keys were made. Only in newer keyboards are the letters printed on top of the keys, or charred from their surface by a laser. In older ones – those from the early 1960s laboratory computers, or the 1980s microcomputers – the way every key was constructed was by first molding the letter from plastic of one color, and then grabbing a different plastic and molding the key around the letter. A Gorton letter was as physical as the key itself. It made the keys virtually indestructible – the legend could not wear off any more than its key – and I imagined required some specialized keyboard-making machinery that came with the “keyboard font” already there.

An example of a “double-shot” key from above and from below

But then, I started seeing Gorton in other places.

Hours of looking at close-ups of keys made me sensitive to the peculiar shapes of some of its letters. No other font had a Q, a 9, or a C that looked like this.

One day, I saw what felt like Gorton on a ferry traversing the waters Bay Area. A few weeks later, I spotted it on a sign in a national park. Then on an intercom. On a street lighting access cover. In an elevator. At my dentist’s office. In an alley.

These had one thing in common. All of the letters were carved into the respective base material – metal, plastic, wood. The removed shapes were often filled in with a different color, but sometimes left alone.

At one point someone explained to me Gorton must have been a routing font, meant to be carved out by a milling machine rather than painted on top or impressed with an inked press.

Some searches quickly led me to George Gorton Machine Co., a Wisconsin-based company which produced various engraving machines. The original model 1 led to model 1A and then 3U and then, half a decade later, P1-2. They were all pantograph engravers: They allowed you to install one or more letter templates and then trace their shape by hand. A matching rotating cutter would mimic your movements, and the specially configured arms would enlarge or reduce the output to the size you wanted.

Edited from a video Saving The Machine the World Forgot with kind permission from Inheritance Machining

The first font in the 1952’s company catalogue was called Gorton...