Dan X. Solo

About

Oakland typesetter who spent seventy years collecting America's discarded display type and ran it as Solotype Typographers from 1962: a working shop selling unusual typography and optical effects, and the archive behind some sixty Dover books. His 1992 Solotype Catalog listed 4,147 faces under his own house names and became a sourcebook for the freeware digitizers who followed.

He began collecting antique type in 1942, at fourteen, supplied Dover with 100-alphabet books from 1974, and in the 1990s digitized his own archive for Dover's book-and-disk sets. His own digitizations are sold by MyFonts' Solotype foundry (58 families). He died in 2012; the books remain in print.