Dan X. Solo: the man who cataloged 4,147 typefaces

Dan X. Solo (1928 to 2012) was an Oakland typesetter who spent seventy years rescuing the display typefaces America threw away. From 1962 he ran the collection as Solotype Typographers, a working shop, and from 1974 he published it in Dover books of 100 alphabets at a time. His 1992 catalog of 4,147 faces became the specimen source a generation of freeware digitizers traced from.

How does a fourteen-year-old end up with a type archive?

By his own chronology he produced his first printing in 1935, acquired his first new type in 1938, and bought his first antique type in 1942, aged fourteen. The Solotype Archive dates from that purchase. He was a kid printer, then a radio actor, and he never really stopped collecting: the chronology he printed in his catalog reads like a life organized around type, first commercial typography in 1959, type hunts out of state from 1953, then in Europe in 1978 and the Orient after that. What he hunted was the unfashionable stuff: the Victorian display faces, wood types, and novelty alphabets that printers were discarding as the industry modernized. His preface to the catalog explains the taste plainly. Printing ran on romans, italics, and blackletters for 350 years before display types exploded in the 1800s, and he found the disused ones more interesting than the survivors. Decorative types, he wrote, keep typography from being “dreadfully dull”.

What was Solotype Typographers?

A business, not a hobby room. Established in 1962 on Crestmont Drive in Oakland, Solotype sold typesetting in unusual faces and, increasingly, optical special effects: from 1963 he produced distorted, outlined, and otherwise manipulated lettering, and in 1973 he patented the Altergraph, a machine for modifying type optically. If an art director in 1975 needed a headline in a face no living printer stocked, set at a slant with a drop shadow, Solo was the call. The catalog he eventually published is the shop’s sales literature: every face in it is one you could order set.

Where did the Dover books come from?

In 1974 Solo began supplying Dover Publications with mechanicals, the camera-ready art, for books of 100 alphabets on a theme. By his own count he did 30 of the alphabet books and 30 more of printers’ ornaments, borders, and similar material; Open Library credits him with roughly sixty works in all. The formula rarely changed: 100 complete fonts, selected and arranged from the Solotype Typographers catalog, sold cheap ($5.95 for a typical volume) to artists who would trace, clip, and paste the letters into their own work. Victorian Display Alphabets (1976) started the run; Sans Serif, Condensed, Bold Script, 3-D and Shaded, and Art Deco volumes followed, and the series was still adding titles like Grunge Alphabets and Celtic and Medieval Alphabets in 1998. Dover’s back covers billed him as a “Noted print historian”, which was marketing, but not by much.

Did he digitize his own archive?

Yes, late and on his own terms. In the 1990s Dover had him digitize books of 24 fonts each, sold with a disk in the back; he made 12 of them. The relationship ended, by his account, when Dover’s owner Haywood Cirker died and the company was sold. He closed Solotype itself a few years later (Fonts In Use dates the shop to around 2007) and disposed of about half the physical archive, keeping, in his words, “about 6,000 fonts on paper or film”. In retirement he digitized type for relaxation, performed a mindreading act with his wife, and eventually offered his own digitizations for sale through MyFonts, where the Solotype foundry still lists 58 families. He died in 2012.

His books never went out of print, and his afterlife in the font world is larger than his sales ever were. The freeware designers of the 1990s learned the historical repertoire from his pages and traced from them, Alan Carr among them; we tell that story, and the story of his catalog’s double-named faces, in The Solotype Catalog that fed freeware. His page in our designer index is Dan X. Solo.