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alternatehistory.com
The Constitutional Convention is adjourning, and the document is about to be sent to the states for ratification. "Wait," says Benjamin Franklin, "it should be published in a form which will be easy for the state conventions to read. I have been experimenting with fonts, and have come up with this one":
Seriously, Franklin does in fact seem to have had a lifelong interest in fonts (and is there any reason he or someone else couldn't have invented Comic Sans in the eighteenth century?):
"He did not forget more familiar pleasures. Franklin had begun his career as a printer, and he had not been long at Passy before his fingers were itching for the feel of type and paper. He bought a small press and fonts of type from the principal French typographers, the Fournier family; and despite the war ordered more fonts from his old friend Caslon in England and perhaps from Caslon's rival, Baskerville, another old friend. In 1780 he bought a printer's foundry to cast type for him; and later he corresponded with John Walter in England about casting whole words or syllables together, a process that one Ottmar Mergenthaler would perfect a hundred years later with his linotype machine. Franklin's press at Passy was not a toy. He used it to print the passports he often had to sign for Americans in Europe and the promissory notes to facilitate the many financial transactions he had to oversee. But he used it for fun too. He was fond of com-posing little fables and fantasies, 'bagatelles,' for the amusement of his friends. And since his friends were so many, why not present them with well-designed keepsakes in print?..." https://books.google.com/books?id=WjgTv0-XdLYC&pg=PA249