Odd shapes are smoke screens for bad point placement or badly translated curve proportions. This is hardly faithful, I kept getting distracted by new ideas in letter features. Penman Costello merges Rhinoceros beetles and spiney conch shells, the segmentation of carapace armor and goth kids’ rings with the Latin alphabet. Light in weight but prickly and possibly borrowed from blackletter leftover by Pennsylvania’s German population? There is a polite lie in “reviving” lettering like this then allowing it to live with so few kinks in its edges. It was scratchy, as can be expected from enlarging handwritten body text. Unless the coarseness of an outline is a feature, intended by the penman to be a fight between ink and toothy paper, I see little need to digitize it. What captures the eye and the head here is the conflict between wide swoop swash and tight-wristed disconnected letter construction. Considering the deliberate stencil-like approach, I emphasized the overlap of strokes in curves. How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? Can I show how many hand movments are necessary for Costello to build a swash? But, why is the “e” complete? To count the component strokes of one “h” (including that extraneous armor piercing ascender horn ) then glance at the density of the source memorial text is to feel the dedication to repeat that sequence over and achingly over. Respectful dilligent tendonitis.
©1920-something and ™ Patrick W Costello
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