alt Hacker NewsThe photos of the symbol catalogs are incredidble. You really have to admire the precision printing they did in the early 1900s. All those glyphs were created by hand. I'm not exactly sure what sort of lithography process was used (I can't imagine they weren't casting them in lead), but there was definitely nothing digital about it. The results are amazing.
Those would be characters set with lead type. Most twentieth century designs would be created using a pantograph to engrave matrices for casting type although traditionally, a type designer would engrave punches which would be essentially the characters engraved at printing size, then struck into a blank matrix for casting the type.