Looking at some of the very old fonts on your page got me wondering about the Gutenberg Bible. It very famously had a printed font, not hand-lettering, but I'm wondering if that very first printed font had a name. Is this just "blackletter but semi-automated"? Did Gutenberg call it something, as far as we know? Did it get a retroactive name?
A few pages for your perusal:
It didn't have a name at the time. Fonts having names didn't become commonplace until the 1800s.
Today we think of a font as a unique design created by a particular designer, but back then Gutenberg was just trying to replicate the kind of handwriting that scribes were producing at the time, and so he probably wouldn't have thought of it as something he created. It was just "the alphabet", and Gutenberg didn't design the alphabet.
Academics call it "the 42-line bible type" or "the B42 type".
It probably wasn't the first font, though. The font that's believed to be the first is known as the "Donat-Kalender-Type" or "DK type". It's named after its use in a Latin grammar by Aelius Donatus, as well as "calendars" (not actually conventional calendars).
