Close-up.

This weekend I took a little trip to the pet cemetery in the Presidio. There were plenty of ampersands along with other fine examples of home-grown typography.

You can find more info here or you can just view my gallery here.

It’s Caslon 540 Italic.

From Wikipedia:

Caslon 540 was designed by the staff of American Type Founders and released in 1902. The typeface was originally intended for use in advertising and is based on Caslon 471 with shortened descenders. It does not include a bold weight.

Two examples from a great new blog.

I think it is actually a nice ampersand. The tail to the ampersand seems to be an afterthought which is interesting to me.

5.1.3 In heads and titles, use the best available ampersand.

The ampersand is a symbol evolved from the Latin et, meaning and. It is one of the oldest alphabetic abbreviations, and it has assumed over the centuries a wonderful variety of forms. Contemporary offerings are for the most part uninspired, stolid pretzels: unmusical imitations of the treble clef. Often the italic font with an ampersand less repressed than it’s roman counterpart. Since the ampersand is more often used in display work than in ordinary text, the more creative versions are more useful. There is rarely any reason not to borrow the italic ampersand for use with roman text.

From the sidebar on the same page:

Earlier typographers made liberal use of ampersands, especially when setting italic — and relished in their variety of form. The 16th century French printer Christophe Plantin sometimes uses four quite different ampersands in the course of a single paragraph, even when setting something as unwhimsical as the eight-volume polylingual Bible on which he devoted more than six years of his life.

See also: The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web.

An excellent use of an ampersand in a logo. Herb was a master.

Scanned from A History of Graphic Design, by Meggs.

Learn More about Herb Lubalin here.

My pal Chris sent in a picture of his personal favorite ampersand that he happened to have posted up on his wall. It’s from the swashy and very 70s Cabernet italic.