The Solotype archive, preserved

Some of the most useful reference data in type history lives on a free web host, maintained by volunteers, one lapsed account away from vanishing. The Solopedia (the face-by-face index of Dan X. Solo’s Solotype Catalog of 4,147 Display Typefaces) and its sister project, the OPTI Fonts Archive (the index of Castcraft Software’s renamed clone library), are both hosted that way. Font history has already lost sites like this without warning. So, with the data’s factual core only (names, page numbers, and equivalence mappings are facts; the volunteers’ annotation prose remains theirs), font.io now preserves the dataset in three parts.

What is preserved

The Solotype Catalog index. 3,336 documented entries from the Catalog’s sections, each with its Catalog page number and whether a digital version was known to the index’s contributors. Browse the complete contents or download it: CSV · JSON. Solo counted 4,147 faces; the gap is mostly his Optical Effects section, which the volunteers never fully indexed, and faces grouped under a single entry.

The alphabet book lists. 2,704 plate captions across 27 of Solo’s 100-font Dover books, including two books (Bold Script Alphabets, Sans Serif Display Alphabets) transcribed from the scans by font.io in October 2026 because no list existed, and a Victorian list corrected against the plates. Browse the book contents or download: CSV · JSON.

The OPTI index. 944 Castcraft OPTI fonts with the original design or source the archive records for each, the map back from Castcraft’s renames to the real designs. Browse the OPTI index or download: CSV · JSON.

The stories behind the data

The data makes more sense with its people attached. Dan X. Solo himself, the printer who cataloged 4,147 faces, has his own story, and the Catalog that anchors this dataset has a post of its own. Castcraft, the Chicago house behind the OPTI library, is documented disc by disc and font by font. If you build on this data, credit the volunteers who compiled it (the Solopedia and OPTI Fonts Archive communities, from Usenet’s alt.binaries.fonts onward) and the collectors who kept the books scannable. We did the preserving, not the discovering.