The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society does an excellent job of providing late 19th-early 20th century fonts and prop documents for role-playing games.[1] I use some of those for steampunk projects.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.hplhs.org/resources.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.hplhs.org/resources.php</a>
So I collect telephones.<p>I'll often catch stuff like this when watching period-set movies or TV shows.<p>Mad Men deserves credit though - in six years they made one mistake - they had a set with a modular plug in it at Don's house (and it wasn't even a modular plug, it was an insert that could be replaced with a modular one on a G-Type handset).
One thing I noticed:<p>People are starting to forget what old computer screens looked like. It could be because there's a shortage of actual, functional CRT monitors. But these days when an old computer is called for you are likely to see perfectly smooth, green text in Consolas or similar composited onto a prop screen, rather than actual glowing pixels. It's jarring and saddening, and it's happened in two films that I've seen so far: <i>John Wick Chapter 2</i> (wherein VIC-20s stood in for the old computer keyboards) and <i>Kong: Skull Island</i>.
Ah, so this article looks at anachronistic use of typography in movies set in the past. In the other direction is:<p><a href="https://typesetinthefuture.com/" rel="nofollow">https://typesetinthefuture.com/</a>
Being devil's advocate here for a moment... Surely ensuring that the text shown on screen is easily readable for the audience (especially so for exposition props such as newspapers), outweighs the need to be temporally correct with the typeface?
The typographer Matthew Butterick was so bothered by the use of Verdana in “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” that he wrote a letter to Brad Bird, the film’s director.<p>PDF: <a href="http://mbtype.com/pdf/bird-verdana.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://mbtype.com/pdf/bird-verdana.pdf</a>
I really admire the author for being able to identify so many types with just a few letterforms. I've had a passing interest in types so I can identify basic Microsoft/Apple free fonts as well as a few common Adobe ones like Minion Pro and Myriad Pro. I think I can identify perhaps at most thirty different typefaces. Anyone wants to chime in on how you are able to be familiar with so many more?
I abandoned TLC's Halt and Catch Fire when the IBM 3033 started up with a black on white CGA font on a 3278. And, of course, booting into PC-DOS.<p>I made <a href="https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font</a> for a reason.
Lol, I remember seeing the film "Helvetica" [1] in which one of the commenters remarked how anachronistic fonts would ruin a movie for him.<p>[1] www.imdb.com/title/tt0847817