Stephanie and I walked to her apartment (on 105th) from the Big Nick's on 77th via Broadway on Monday - See route on left. (Yeah, I know Point A is somewhere around 66th. I was thinking that's where we started, but I was wrong - and I don't feel like fixing it. You get the idea.)

I decided to take a picture of every instance of Cooper Black I saw on our journey. To tell the truth, I was a little disappointed. We counted:

• 13 business signs (as in the primary name of business on an awning or otherwise above the entrance)
• 6 posters, sandwich boards, or supplementary information signs
• 1 truck

Of those, the majority (I'd say 80%) were north of 96th street. I thought there would be more. It was noted that we might have had better luck walking on Amsterdam. Hopefully I'll get the chance to try that sometime. Broadway is too consumed with its hoity-toity Copperplate to use much Cooper Black (barf).

I saw about 1,000 that were cooler than these while waiting for the bus in Chinatown and riding through Brooklyn and The Bronx today. Oh well. I don't mean to be too down. There were some nice specimens. Check out the gallery below.

Cooper Black. I haven't found much use for it... and it can't logically be used in a HTML/CSS font stack (because many users probably don't have it installed and it has such a goofy width) but it's a great font.

I love the pseudo-lowercase numbers and non-whimsical playfulness achieved trough the absurdly fat baselines and (more importantly) bulbous serifs. With all that, it still conveys a certain amount of seriousness... or at least authority.

That serif on the bottom half of the capital "G" screams "don't mess with me!" while the top/bottom serifs on the 'H'/'I' say "what's up? we're cool, right? You can totally approach me".

And the 'A' is just laughing the whole time.

I think I saw it used in a Canadian Grocery Store Logo behind homeplate at the Roger's Center (Toronto Bluejays). That's what got me thinking about it.

Nice.