Here is a wedding invitation using 24 point Parsons with it’s 48 pt. long characters for the names of the bride and groom. I whited out some of the more personal information and have included the A7 envelope with the printed flap that I provided with the invitations. The challenge of Parsons, if you have both ascenders and descenders in the same line, is to construct a solid 72 point line of lead using space material to support the characters both above and below the main 24 point text. In this example the second line of the names the “h” goes up and includes the ampersand and the “p” and the “y” go down. (Click on scans to enlarge)

My printing mentor, Jim Walczak, very generously supplied me with several sizes of Parsons. The smaller text of the above invitation is 14 point Parsons Italic without using any long characters. Parsons is not readily available from any type founder that I know of. A 12 point version with 24 point long characters was cast by the Dale Guild in 2010 and eight fonts were offered on Briar Press. I am not aware of any other foundry that has the mats and I welcome comments from anyone who knows of a source for Parsons type.

Parsons was designed in 1917 for BB&S by Will Ransom, who thought the long characters should be used sparingly. One of my workshop students used Parsons for this project: