I’ve procured a vector drawing of the Manhattan bridge finials. The next challenge, in case this was getting too straightforward, is to identify the font from the bridge’s dedication plaque. Or find something close.

And, in the spirit of free association, while meeting the book ripper, I also learned a thing or two that I’ve been wanting to know about free OCR software that works, a thing I had pretty much given up on. The word on the street, though, is that both Tesseract and Cuneiform are worth a gander. The latters’ entry on wikipedia being perhaps a useful jumping off place.

So I could OCR the plaque. But that won’t actually help me pick a font. Is it just Garamond? (And, is the plaque even original to the bridge? I have a sneaking suspicion it is not.)