Grand Central Terminal: 100 Years of a New York Landmark

Published July 8, 2025

The cover typography features both weights of Grand Central, Light and Bold.

LTypI is a moniker for the act of picking a typeface because its name matches the content. Some cases have little to do with an actual lack of typographic imagination, and rather are just wonderfully topical. This book is such an example. Authored by Anthony W. Robbins and the New York Transit Museum, it was published in 2013 to celebrate the centennial of New York’s Grand Central Terminal.

For the cover, contents, and chapter titles, Topos Graphics opted for Grand Central. What else would have been more appropriate? Tobias Frere-Jones designed this all-caps typeface in the mid-1990s when the station underwent a full renovation. Two Twelve hired him “to design a typeface in Grand Central’s distinct Beaux-Arts style”, to “keep new locator maps and signage in harmony with the old lettering.” [Frere-Jones Type] When the station was built in the 1910s, signpainters used “an American take” on the so-called “French Oldstyle”, a genre that goes back to French printer Louis Perrin and his mid-19th century reinterpretation of ancient Roman lettering, the Caractères Augustaux. The characteristic R with its curved and pointed leg can also be found in the tile lettering for the subway sign.

In 2018, Frere-Jones together with Nina Stössinger revisited the theme, then with lowercase characters and as a six-weight family with italics. The resulting typeface, Empirica, happens to be used on the Grand Central Terminal’s website.

Colophon and contents

Detail from the table of contents

Grand Central is also used for chapter titles.

The typeface used for body copy, captions and running titles is Sentinel.

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