Bill Welch wrote:

All of the decal talk reminds me of a question I have had for awhile: Was the type style used by the FGE/WFE/BRE System truly known as "Optic?" I think my knowledge of this font comes from a Sunshine PDS, but I have seen other references to Optic, although I cannot remember where.

Bill, I have a modest collection of type catalogs, including the Solo catalog of 19th century metal types, and none of them mentions Optic. But the Clover House dry transfers included alphabets called OCTIC (maybe named because corners are cut off of squarish letters, as in making an octagon). It is a slab-serif type which does look like the FGE lettering. On the other hand the name "Octic" has been used for several other fonts of quite different appearance. For example, there is a Linotype face which can be purchased, and another is available as a free download from dafont.com, but neither matches the Clover House version nor FGE.

Tony Thompson Editor, Signature Press, Berkeley, CA
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