LTC Athena brings a somewhat "lost" hot-metal typeface back from obscurity into digital Opentype format.

 

Athena is a rare typeface whose original matrices were destroyed and therefore thought to be lost to time. In the Fall of 2012, printing historian Rich Hopkins contacted P22 type foundry regarding a collection of inked type drawings he had just uncovered from his acquisition of the Baltimore base "Baltotype" company some 20 years ago. The Athena drawings included a full upper and lower case set, numerals, basic punctuation and alternate forms of some letters.

The design is a narrow deco flavored design from the 1950s and bares resemblance to the all caps Lanston typeface, LTC Spire. Athena was designed by George Battee specifically for Baltotype and features a curious avoidance of straight lines in the stems and main strokes. The face has now been expanded to over 340 characters by Miranda Roth and includes ligatures and a full Pan-European character set. LTC Athena is released through the Lanston division of P22 in consideration of it's earlier incarnation as a metal typeface.