A question about some 1960s single type border units and a question about whether Unicode should encode single type borders

[William_J_G Overington]

I had in mind asking about something in this mailing list that might of 
itself be off-topic yet which may be of interest to some of the readers 
of this mailing list. Yet when working out what to write I found myself 
considering something which may well be possibly directly on topic, but 
I am not sure whether it is or not.
 
The original topic is that I remember that in the mid 1960s I was given 
a few copies of then recent issues of the Monotype Newsletter when 
visiting the office of the Monotype Corporation at 43 Fetter Lane, 
London. In one of these, or maybe in a later issue that was sent to me, 
was an article about a collection of then newly released single type 
border units, possibly at one of 24 point, 30 point, or 36 point size.
 
These were ten national emblem designs, five for constructing a straight 
border and five for corners. They could be used individually or mixed as 
desired. There was a rose, a thistle, a leek, a daffodil, a shamrock. 
Two of each, for a straight line and a corner.
 
At that time the Monotype Corporation sold matrices for use in casting 
metal type. These matrices could be bought by businesses that used 
Monotype type casting machines. Some businesses cast type for one-off 
use in-house for printing, some businesses cast in a harder alloy and 
sold the type thus cast for repeated use in handset printing to people 
who used printing machines, whether by way of trade, or as hobbyist 
Private Press printers. My interest was in hobbyist Private Press.
 
So whereas the Monotype Corporation offered for purchase a vast number 
of matrices, each business that bought them only bought a selection of 
them to suit their needs. So such things as this national emblems set 
need not necessarily become available to Private Presses that bought 
type from a typefounder. As far as I am aware, it was not.
 
So I thought that I would ask in this mailing list as to whether those 
designs have been, or could be please, released in a digital form. Maybe 
these days in colour versions too.
 
And then I thought, could they be encoded in regular Unicode?
 
And I thought, well I cannot say that they would be used in a run of 
plain text. So maybe no.
 
Yet the issue that I then wondered about is that files that are not 
plain text yet which contain Unicode characters are interchanged.
 
So where does that fit in?
 
Should Unicode encode characters that are single type borders that might 
well be used in a rich text document such as a poem surrounded by a 
border that is sent from one person to another? Or not.
 
William Overington
 
Monday 22 April 2024
 
 
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