Will Ransom designed the exemplar for this series for Barnhart Brothers & Spindler in the early 1900s. The typeface was originally named “Parsons”, after the advertising director of a Chicago department store (evidently a very BIG customer of BB&S).

Both versions of this font contain the Unicode 1252 (Latin) and Unicode 1250 (Central European) character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.