Central Steel and Wire Company

Central Steel & Wire Company is a metal service center at the corner of Warehouse Street and East Bessemer Avenue in East Greensboro. The company is over 100 years old with branches in Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Greensboro. According to their website, they distribute and process quality ferrous and nonferrous metal products. Serendipitously, we happened upon their warehouse when we were on the east side of Greensboro to photograph another venue. This sign caught our attention because we have been reading the blog of Therese Cox, Ampersand Seven. Now, we stop to notice script, writing, and fonts in general. Her blog led us to the work of typographer/font expert Tobias Frere-Jones. 

If you follow these links and really want to know more about fonts, watch this You Tube Movie trailer for Helveitca. Beware, in the movie Helvetica, Frere-Jones warns that once you know fonts, watching movies is never the same for you as you can spot an historically inaccurate font in a heartbeat! All this tangent is to say that this brilliant blogger, Therese Cox, led us to this wonderful company via their captivating sign. We challenge Ms. Cox and any font experts for that matter to identify the font used by Central Steel and Wire. (By the way, we think Therese should quit her day job and start an internet-based, font-identification service). 

Finally, if you see other interesting signs, fonts, or writing in Greensboro that would be of interest to photograph, please let GDP know. We'll be there!

Comments

[chrome3d]

I´ve used whatthefont.com for identifying fonts.It´s not always accurate but sometimes the match is perfect. Usually these very old fonts don´t have any exact match as they were probably drawn by hand and they were not from one font set to begin with.

[&7]

Thanks for the plug, GDP. And now the gauntlet has been thrown...

Closest match (though by no means a perfect one) is EF Nevison Casual, a font designed in 1967 by T. Nevison. Central Steel looks like they've been around for about 100 years, but I wonder if this warehouse was put up in the late sixties, then given a "hip" new trendy font to go with it.

I'll have to try whatthefont sometime. I usually go through identifont.com, will find some vague resemblance, and then find myself hooked on an obsessive online hunt till I find what I'm looking for. But what I dream of is having access to the sorts of archives you can see at Hoefler & Frere-Jones in the Helvetica documentary. I'm a dusty old library type researcher myself. I just use the internet 'cause, you know, it's a convenient bad habit.

Great post!

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