--- In STMFC@..., Anthony Thompson <thompson@...> wrote:

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.

Very true, and the problem gets worse as time goes on, because you no longer need a type foundry and a set of hand crafted master patterns to offer a typeface for sale; all you need is a copy of Fontographer and a web site.

Here is one version of Octic (hope the link works):

http://www.fonts.com/findfonts/searchresults.htm?kid=octic

Here is one called Refrigerator:

http://www.fonts.com/findfonts/searchresults.htm?kid=refrigerator

Both of these look similar to the more modern sans serif lettering used by FGE, in fact, given the name, I bet Refrigerator was inspired by the lettering on refrigerator cars. That's not to say it IS the lettering on refrigerator cars, and certainly not to say that this is what the FGE draftsmen were working from.

Dennis