Anonymous asked: What is your opinion of Cooper Black? This font that looks pretty similar to Windsor to my eye, and appears to have been a staple of a similar vintage.
In the past, I have referred here to Cooper Black as Windsor’s “good-for-nothing, hard-partying half-brother.” That may be somewhat true, but it’s probably not entirely fair. Cooper Black is simply used and abused more often than Windsor.
In my opinion (which becomes more and more worthless the less I post here on South 12th), there are three great old-style typefaces, all created in the 1910s, revived in the ’70s, and all of a similar look and feel: Windsor, Cooper Black, and Souvenir. Windsor is the most elegant, Cooper Black is the most overused, and poor Souvenir is a little of both. (Wikipedia says: “Due to its enormous popularity in the 1970s, Souvenir has become associated with the typographical excesses of that era and subsequent generations of typographers have come to loathe it.” Ahem: citation needed.)
Anyway, a nice example of Souvenir used well is in the cover design of the Alec Soth book the Walker published a few years ago. In fact, I remember reading a review of the book, and the reviewer made a crack about the design, but in doing so mistook the Souvenir for Cooper Black. So you see the three of them are very easy to mix up. Windsor, Cooper Black, Souvenir, together forever.
