Believing that the price was way out of their league, House did not follow up on Benguiat's suggestion. Nonetheless, since House often referred to Photo-Lettering designs when they designed their own fonts, they thought it was appropriate that they become the custodians of this historic collection.

The opportunity arose over a year ago, and it was announced that House Industries was preparing to make the digital fonts public. The first batch of materials was launched April 12 at http://www.photolettering.com/a/g21cba. And here is the story of how this came to be from House's co-founder Rich Roat:

We received a call from Bob Rose, one of the Photo-Lettering partners who was managing the company's remaining assets. We happened to be working on a separate project with Ed Benguiat [whose Photo-Lettering faces were emblematic of the sixties and seventies] where we were creating updated digital versions of five of his Photo-Lettering alphabets, and saw this as an opportunity to get first-hand reference.

While the large collection of photo-type was intrinsically priceless, Rose told Roat, the physical mass of the collection had become an expensive burden for the remaining owners. "However," continues Roat, "they did not want to see it haplessly digitized and tossed into a landfill and they heard that we were silly enough to take on the burden of historic preservation."

The collection consists of the 9,000-odd film negative alphabets, which are now housed in three large fireproof steel cabinets. House also has many of the corresponding film positives.

"Most of the original films were in good shape, but the filing system was in significant disarray," Roat further explains. "Some of the older films are slowly decomposing and bubbling, so we're trying to at least get scans of those before they are completely unreadable. Fortunately, we have several of the original glass plates, which are quite stunning."

House contacted Ed Rondthaler, who was nearing his 100th birthday, to help them document the history. "He graciously agreed to give us an audio narrative while flipping through one of the last One-Liner [specimen] catalogs, so we have about eight hours of historical data straight from the founder." They also spent a day at his Croton-on-Hudson home with a film crew.

Roat noticed that Rondthaler had placed Post-It notes on various objects around his house. The gist of each note was "'When I die, so and so wants this.' We also noticed hundreds of Photo-Lettering artifacts with no Post-It notes on them, so we worked up the gumption to ask him if we could buy some of those items. He promptly replied that we should come back and take anything we wanted. We spent another day rooting through his house (where he'd lived since 1938) and taking a vanload of Photo-Lettering items back to the studio to be archived and cataloged."