Examples of Modern Alphabets, Plain and Ornamental
The pattern
This still is filed under Direct-from-the-founder letter.
Define
A letter in one person's voice, written as if to one reader, signed by the person who owns the outcome.
Mechanism
Personal authority. The signature is the proof. The tone is the brand. A committee cannot write this and keep the mechanism.
Verdict
Trust sits on a person
Why it works
The book solves a distribution problem, not an aesthetic one. Before it, an alphabet lived in one master's head or one workshop's pattern chest; Delamotte engraves each style flat, names it, numbers it and sells the whole set for a few shillings, which turns tacit craft into a lookup table. The shading is doing quiet work too: by printing one colour and building the shadow out of engraved hatching, he shows the sign painter exactly where the highlight and the shadow go, so the plate is a set of instructions rather than a picture. Naming every plate is the real mechanism, because a style you can ask for by name is a style a client can commission.
Steal this when
Use this structure when you want to own a craft vocabulary: publish one clean specimen per variant, name each one, number it, and make the set cheap enough that the trade keeps it on the bench. It is the right move when your expertise is currently locked in your own execution and you want other people quoting your names back to you.