In 2007, on my first trip to New York City, I grabbed a brand-new DSLR camera and photographed all the fonts I was supposed to love. I admired American Typewriter in all of the I <3 NYC logos, watched Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica fighting over the subway signs, and even caught an occasional appearance of the flawlessly-named Gotham, still a year before it skyrocketed in popularity via Barack Obama’s first campaign.
But there was one font I didn’t even notice, even though it was everywhere around me.
Last year in New York, I walked over 100 miles and took thousands of photos of one and one font only.
It’s hard to believe today that there was a time before I knew of Gorton and all its quirks and mysteries. The first time I realized the font even existed was some time in 2017, when I was researching formy book about the history of typing.
Many keyboards, especially older ones, sported a particular distinctive font on their keycaps. It was unusually square in proportions, and a weird mélange of “mechanical” and “childish.”
The strangeness extended to the digits. There was a top-flatted 3 resembling common Cyrillic styling, 7 sloping down in a unique way, a very geometric 4, an unusual – perhaps even naïve – symmetry between 6 and 9, and a conflation of O with 0 that would be a fireable offense elsewhere.
Looking at just a few keyboards, it was also obvious that it wasn’t just one rigid font. There were always variations, sometimes even on one keyboard. 0 came square, dotted, or slashed. The usually very narrow letter I sometimes sported serifs. The R and the 6 moved their middles higher or lower. There also seemed to be a narrower version of the font, deployed when a keycap needed a word and not just a letter. (Lowercase letters existed too, but not very often.)
My first thought was: What a mess. Is this how “grotesque” fonts got their name?
Then, the second thought: I kind of like it.
But what font was it? What The Font website posited TT Rounds, Identifont suggested it could be Divulge, my early guess was DIN Rounded or something related to road signage. Whatever it was, a flat R clearly separated it from Helvetica, and the shapes were not as round as even the un-rounded Gotham’s.
A few places for keyboard nerds referred to the font as “Gorton,” but that phrase yielded zero results anywhere I typically looked for fonts I could download and install.
I originally thought this had to do with how keys were made. Only in newer keyboards are the letters printed on top of the keys, or charred from their surface by a laser. In older ones – those from the early 1960s laboratory computers, or the 1980s microcomputers – the way every key was constructed was by first molding the letter from plastic of one color, and then grabbing a different plastic and molding the key around the letter. A Gorton letter was as physical as the key itself. It made the keys virtually indestructible – the legend could not wear off any more than its key – and I imagined required some specialized keyboard-making machinery that came with the “keyboard font” already there.