Pekin is an unusual design with an oriental flavor. It was originally designed by Ernst Lauschke and released by The Great Western Type Foundry of Chicago as “Dormer,” which is similar to the French verb ‘to sleep,’ not exactly a marketing triumph.

Barnhart Bros. And Spindler (independently-operated subsidiary of ATF since 1911) bought Great Western in 1918. According to McGrew, AMERICAN METAL TYPEFACES of the TWENTIETH CENTURY, BB&S renamed the typeface prior printing their 1925 specimen book — guess they wanted something just a tad more exciting.

Quirky, distinctive and fun.

Pekin ML represents a major extension of the original release, with the following changes:

1. Added glyphs for the 1250 Central Europe, the 1252 Turkish and the 1257 Baltic Code Pages. Added glyphs to complete standard 1252 Western Europe Code Page. Special glyphs relocated and assigned Unicode codepoints, some in Private Use area. Total of 415 glyphs (compared to 218 glyphs in the original release).

2. 652 Kerning Pairs. Note: Ag, Aj and gj will cross unless kerned. Alternative A may also be used.

3. Added OpenType GSUB layout features: onum, salt, liga, dlig, hist, ornm and kern.

4. Revised vertical metrics for improved cross-platform line spacing.

5. Refined various glyph outlines, based on improved scans.

6. Added set of Tabular Numbers at cap height, based on original design; added Old-Style Numbers based on default design.

7. Added a bunch of alternative characters: 18 upper case letters, 10 lower case letters, 1 ampersand and 1 bullet. The alternate c is actually the original design, but I don't like it - easily confused with e. Alt E H M h m n r t are from the original design. I added the rest.

8. 7 Ligatures, 4 Ornaments, 18 Geometric Shapes, 6 Arrows and 12 Misc. Symbols.

The zip package includes two versions of the font at no extra charge. There is an OTF version which is in Open PS (Post Script Type 1) format and a TTF version which is in Open TT (True Type)format. Use whichever works best for your applications.