The Instructor Primary Science Concept Charts
In the 1960s, the F.A. Owen Publishing Company in Dansville, New York, produced various sets of classroom charts, including The Instructor Primary Science Concept Charts for Kindergarten and Primary Grades and The Instructor Kindergarten-Primary Measurement Concept Charts, explaining topics such as animals, air and weather, magnetism, or earth and sky. They were prepared by Donald Nasca and designed by Cynthia Amrine.
If you want to replicate the typography with digital fonts, your best option is Bookman Headline as published by Bitstream. For the sans serif: There are various digitizations of Bernhard Gothic. To my knowledge, the version by Spiece Graphics is the only one to include the Medium Condensed cut.
See more images from this wonderful collection on the Present&Correct blog — via @CasualOptimist.
3 Comments on “The Instructor Primary Science Concept Charts”
These crop up in the background of some classroom footage in I Am Not Your Negro representing James Baldwin’s upbringing in New York in the 1920s/30s.
Eagle eye! You should team up with Mark Simonson for a sequel to Typecasting: The Use (and Misuse) of Period Typography in Movies.
Ha! I’m not bothered by it, it’s genuine archive footage all right and I doubt there’s much pre-WWII documentary footage of classrooms available.
Made me wonder if some of these posters aren’t a bit older than that date (some other pictures online of her work use News Gothic and feel much more 60s), but blog posts and copyright listings referencing Amrine I can find only point to her being active post-war. (The animals kit in these pictures is presumably what this May 1964 listing refers to.) I’d love to know more about her work, though.