It's a circus style that Intecsas sold under the name of Buffalo Bill (often available as freeware from the David Rakowski collection, before Intecsas marketed them). These fonts used to be sold by Precision Type, but they recently ceased selling fonts.

Adobe also sold it as 'Rosewood'.

The Solotype Catalog (p.36) calls it 'Coffee Can Initials'.

More than you ever wanted to know.

%?(??an exact match but you might find something you like here or you could try other keywords like circus or wildwest (neither of which quite yielded your font).

You could also look at circus which is free.

Coffee Can Initials is by no means the same as your sample,
but is likely as close as you're going to get in a font.

I thought I'd mention that Rick Mueller, like Rakowski, digitized
this typeface years ago and Buffalo Bill may still be had via Faces.

Mike, You're right that Coffee Can Initials is different than the posted sample. It is however just like Rick Mueller's Coffee Tin, and Buffalo Bill. It is Adobe Rosewood which is like the posted sample.

My Bad. I thought they were all the same.

I'm REALLY not trying to be contentious Mike, but to my inexpert eye they
ARE all the same and all, including Rosewood, have the same basic
letterform differences. What am I missing ... ?

To me, it looks like someone took a set of those spear point decorations
and plopped them onto a different font, with little concern for getting them
on straight, no adjustments for size with different letters and no curving in
the G or R.

Coffee Tin and Rosewood are slightly different from one another (see the 'R'), but both are more divergent from the posted sample than they are from each other. The patterning is basically the same, but the letterforms are almost completely different.

So what is the sample? Looks to me like Goudy Heavyface, squoooshed to about 65% and decorated to look like Rosewood/Coffee Tin. I think it's squooshed

Rosewood is almost nothing like the posted sample. The only similarities are the interior diamonds. The letterforms are different in many ways, however. Mike F is right, in my opinion.

OK, I give up. I can see that there are differences, and I agree that Rosewood doesn't match the sample either. I apologize for my lack of precision.

However, Rosewood is NOT the same as all the others, at least in the way the diamonds are on the A.

Mike F. and Metadox have probably nailed it, as an attempt to approximate one of those fonts.

I need to stop 'impressionistic' IDing.

C'mon y'all.
if you look closely, you'll see the obvious: This particular
circus sample was not created in Microsoft Word; it comes
from a typewriter with a special Diamond-Cut
Squished Goudyface only available to the Crack Squad
of Typographers employed by the U.S. Military.

And you call yourselves Type Experts.

Sheesh.



bj

Aha BJ! I was thinking an old Colorforms lettering toy with
press-on vinyl parts, but you've made it clear. That V makes
me think they should have changed the ribbon first.