Let’s wander back a moment to where we laid Times New Roman over the original German headline type. Did you notice that the ‘f’ didn’t match? In Times New Roman, its ascender continues straight up, curling around at the very top to form the ball, which sits entirely to the right of the vertical stroke, the curve of its left edge barely overhanging the bar below.

In the original ‘f’ (on the left, below), the ascender recoils to make way for a ball that sits over the bar, reducing the glyph’s overall width.

There’s also something slightly different going on with the ‘k’. And although it can be made to align, the original font is a little heavier and more compressed. These variations aren’t surprising: Times New Roman was first released in 1931, and numerous cuts have been sold since then. Adobe and Monotype each have their own official versions, and there are many clones, partly because typefaces are poorly protected by copyright in the US.

But that ‘f’ is downright odd. For some reason it made me think of Berthold, and sure enough there it is, in Arbiter, Mikaway, Simone, Tyfa… It’s by no means unique to that foundry, of course. The recoiling vertical is seen in a number of italics, and cutouts making way for balls are commonplace in super-heavy weights; but in a basic bold like this it’s unusual.

In cuts of Times, still more unusual: the only other example I can find anywhere is in Monotype’s Small Text variant, which I bet nobody’s touched since the heyday of newspaper classifieds.

What does this prove? Well, whoever typeset this was using a weird cut of TNR that doesn’t seem to match those currently available digitally. That could support the document being real, or it could just mean whoever faked it was using a free knockoff font from some dodgy website. We’re no further forward, but if you’re still reading this post I’m going to assume you’re as fond of little rabbit holes like this as I am, so there’s no need to apologise for wasting that last 40 seconds of your time.

While we’re talking typefaces, let’s take a closer look at the body text of the German blurb. It looks quite different from the English version. (The quality of the photo happens to be better, but let’s try to ignore that.) The spacing is similar: normal to slightly loose tracking (horizontal), normal to slightly wide word spacing, slightly tight leading (vertical). Again, it hasn’t been hand-kerned — look at the ‘Ta’ in ‘Tatendrang’ (a lovely word that translates as ‘zest for action’).

But it looks nicer, doesn’t it? That’s mainly because it’s not set in ugly Times New Roman. What exactly it is set in, I’m not quite sure: it’s another transitional serif, but feels closer to its late Renaissance roots. Note the tapering ‘J’, descending below the baseline. It might remind Adobe users of Robert Slimbach’s Minion, which wasn’t released until 1990 — but don’t get excited, it’s not a match. If I’m missing an obvious identification, someone comment and tell me so I can kick myself.

Anyway, the two documents, though similarly laid out at a glance, are differently typeset. And remember this is at a time (if we believe the date) when a ‘font’ is either an actual box of metal type, or a set of matrices for hot metal, or a newfangled Digiset template — all eye-wateringly expensive. This isn’t just two designers on their respective Macs picking different fonts from the list and thinking they look near enough the same.

Both LEGO documents say they were ‘Printed in Germany by Mühlmeister & Johler, Hamburg’. Founded in 1876, this firm no longer appears to be trading, but was a big deal in its time. You might guess that if LEGO was printing everything for the European market in Germany, that was because its print design function was headquartered there, and one team would be producing localised versions of each document for the various territories where LEGO products were sold.

So why would it typeset two versions of the same document using different fonts?

And why, in 1974, would a document be labelled ‘Printed in Germany’, when there was no such country? It had been divided since 1945 into West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany), where LEGO no doubt operated, and East Germany (the German Democratic Republic).