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Comment by tmoertel | Hacker News Reader

The issue is that the author presents the entire set of typefaces that are similar to Gorton as derived from Gorton without presenting evidence to rule out the obvious alternative lineage: that, just like genuine Gorton, they too were derived from the various regional single-stroke letterforms that draftsman everywhere were taught and used. Excellent draftsman’s examples abounded and would have been so much more common than genuine Gorton and its genuine ancestors that it’s hard to believe that regional companies marketing their own type engraving machines would have had to copy Gorton rather than local examples of the draftsman’s art that were considered superior.

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The article has a link to the licensing agreement between Taylor Hobson and Gorton, links to other posts explaining how Leroy bought Gorton machines, an interactive comparison where you can see the similarity of the letters, and dozens of photos and scans of docs where you can compare them yourself, too. I would say that is a lot of evidence presented.

But that evidence is not persuasive that the set of fonts that the author calls Gorton are actually derived from the lineage he presents (see the diagram captioned “The Gorton quasisuperfamily”), rather than from freehand lettering that would have been much more widely used at the time. Remember that the letterforms themselves could not qualify for legal protection in the United States. So none of the licensing agreements offered as evidence were needed to acquire the fonts. So we can conclude that they were executed to acquire the machines and the patents behind them for the purpose of introducing similar machines in a new market. The machine designs and methods of production were the hard part. The fonts were comparatively trivial to create and incorporate into a machine, whatever its design.

The author's comparison of the fonts actually argues against them being of the claimed lineage. Consider the many differences between the Taylor, Taylor & Hobson machine’s fonts and the Gorton machine’s fonts. If Gorton had a license to use the Hobson machine designs, which they did, they could have simply copied the TT&H fonts verbatim. But they clearly did not. Why not? I think it's likely that they simply preferred a different design, one closer to the letterforms that were more commonly used by draftsmen in the American market. In other words, the Gorton reference design was not the TT&H font design.

At least, that's my best guess based on the evidence presented.

This quote is where the author seems to reach the conclusion they want, that is Gorton being the Proto-Indo-European of these drafting letterforms:

> Each of these reappearances made small changes to the shapes of some letters. Leroy’s ampersand was a departure from Gorton’s. Others softened the middle of the digit 3, and Wrico got rid of its distinctive shape altogether. Sometimes the tail of the Q got straightened, the other times K cleaned up. Punctuation – commas, quotes, question marks – was almost always redone. But even without hunting down the proof confirming the purchase of a Gorton’s pantograph or a Leroy template set as a starting point, the lineage of its lines was obvious. (The remixes riffed off of Gorton Condensed or the normal, squareish edition… and at times both. The extended version – not that popular to begin with – was often skipped.)

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