From type to font to type: a Crandall story

This was the book, self-published by Paul Lippman in 1992, that turned me into a maniac when I got hold of it in 1994. As soon as I saw the New Model Crandall on the cover, I was fascinated and hooked.It took about a decade for me to get hold of a New Model Crandall myself. It's a rough specimen, not functional, but still wonderful.In 2005, I got a notion that I could try to turn the typeface on its type cylinder into a digital font. I pulled out the cylinder, inked it, and rolled it carefully over a piece of glossy cardboard. Then I made the best scan I could, and arranged the characters into alphabetical order:I worked with a template provided by a website that can turn handwriting into a font. After various experiments and adjustments, I had this:This was the basis of a digital font I dubbed Lucien, in honor of inventor Lucien S. Crandall. You can download that font from my website and type like this:I went on to use Lucien in ETCetera when I started editing it in 2006.And now, the…