In the opening scenes of the 1938 Three Stooges comedy “Tassels in the Air” the Stooges are working as maintenance men inside an office building. Their immediate job requirement is to paint the tenants’ business names on the corresponding office doors with pre-cut stencils. Of course, they get it all wrong.
Nonetheless, the stencils appear to be a hand cut sans serif design in a squared or ‘block’ style with rounded corners, and some of the applied lettering made for an interesting challenge to recreate as a typeface.
The end result is Maintenance Stencil JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.