I just came across on Harper's Bazaar's website a lowercase L that looks the like capital I with an extra serif sticking to the left in the middle (kind of like ⟨I⟩ superimposed with text-figure ⟨1⟩). See e.g. "looks", "Viola", "Winslet", etc. here.

Is this style of lowercase L something found in existing typefaces? The font is SangBleu OG Serif by Swiss Typefaces and it appears to be the only typeface of theirs that has this type of L. Nardog (talk) 05:22, 6 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Beats me why they're calling those all one typeface instead of five. Anyway, in the "OG serif" incarnation, they got the weird arm on the lowercase L from Romain du Roi. The long s also has one. This incunable (from incunable) also has the nub (arm? Bar? Flag?) on lowercase L in many instances, but for some reason not all of them.

Edit: I think the nub is missing only in ligatures, mainly el. And I think this is originally a blackletter thing. This handwritten bible shows a similar but less distinct effect, due I think to the minim (palaeography). The scribe first draws a minim, then extends it to write the lowercase L. Caslon's specimen has it, but only in the blackletter face (top right). I think the explanation is thus the same as the origin of the nub on long S.  Card Zero  (talk) 12:08, 6 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The ⟨eſ ⟩ pairs in the Valerius Maximus incunable also have nubless ⟨ſ ⟩es.  --Lambiam 00:01, 7 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, so there is precedent. Nardog (talk) 09:17, 7 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There's a Swedish publisher, Modernista, that uses an st ligature in their logotype. I believe they also use it constantly and consistently within the books themselves, as a brand identity, which of course could come across as pretty strained. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:26, 7 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In that Caslon specimen the ⟨b⟩ and ⟨h⟩ also have nubs. The letter ⟨k⟩ does not occur in the specimen's text, but here we also find the Caslon black ⟨k⟩ nubbed.  --Lambiam 14:11, 7 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Unsatisfied, I dug up this brief discussion of Romain du Roi's lowercase L.The lowercase letter /l shows the most distinctive feature of the letters. It has a small serif on the left side at x-height, called ergot or sécante in French. The serif is a remnant of the calligraphic style which had not appeared in any previous typefaces. This serif makes the Romain du Roi unique. The reason why the Romain du Roi /l possessed the serif is not clearly documented. One theory says that this serif was used to distinguish it more clearly from the capital letter /l, which has the same height. The other theory claims that Louis XIV wanted to have an unmistakable feature in the /l, because his name began with this letter. Yeah. Thing is, Romain du Roi put the bars on the top and bottom of the glyph gratuitously, so if it then needed disambiguating from capital i, that doesn't seem like a very rational thing to have done.  Card Zero  (talk) 17:28, 7 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You might not be satisfied looking for rationality. I think the aim was modernity and it might have been intended to be transitional. The /b and the /d have their strong upper serifs so the /l could not be without its own ( there still can be felt some of that era heavy cavalry dynamics - digging in up - in the double /l as in "brilliant"). --Askedonty (talk) 23:32, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sweet, I've updated Romain du Roi and L. Nardog (talk) 09:38, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The source (written in a sans serif font) falls into the same trap that it's describing. Taken literally, it says that the Romain du Roi needed to distinguish l from L, but we know what it means. Thank you for actually improving Wikipedia, I'll consider doing that sometimes too. :)  Card Zero  (talk) 14:39, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's a borrowing from calligraphy and tends to be called a "spur" in English (I'm getting this from Paul Shaw's book "Revival Type", page 86-7). It and the double-head serif on the el were fairly common in French typefaces until about the end of the nineteenth century. Swiss Typefaces, formerly BP Type, have several fonts influenced by it.

But I'm not an expert on this. My impression is that the best sources are in French, Sebastién Morlighem's very good PhD thesis The 'modern face' in France and Great Britain, 1781-1825: typography as an ideal of progress, on types appearing in its wake, lists various sources on page 35 including a book Le romain du roi: la typographie au service de l’État. I need to cite that thesis in more articles. Blythwood (talk) 22:27, 14 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]