Christopher Bonanos, author of Instant, the story of Polaroid, to be published this fall, New York magazine editor, and someone who knows a lot about a lot of things, publishes a top-notch Polaroid blog called PolaroidLand, where he confessed his love for this typeface.
I couldn't resist sending him a copy of this sheet that was part of a survey I did for Polaroid in 1977, when sloppy phototypesetting had become an abomination.
In the dim dark days of metal type composition, we who struggled with its restrictions came to appreciate the charm of well-designed faces and the elegance of carefully composed headings.
What you might also appreciate is how few sans serif faces could ever be considered to be elegant.
Here follows pages from Berkeley Types, one of Boston's best typesetters showing their wares in July, 1958.
As you can see, there wasn't much to choose and only two versions of News Gothic, indicating not much interest in it as a style. Most art directors at the time went for Venus, Lydian, Futura and the Alternate Gothics. While I liked Futura then, and still do, I couldn't possibly use it for Polaroid where the a and o are almost indistinguishable in lower case. Not appropriate for a brand name often referred to then as Poyl-a-rode.
