Long before Comic Sans attracted the scorn of design nerds, there was Souvenir.

Font hate feels like a relatively new phenomenon, the kind of hobby that only really became popular in the 21st century. But while it’s certainly true that the internet democratized font hating, there have been bugbear typefaces long before Comic Sans was even a glimmer in Vincent Connare’s eye, or Papyrus first invoked Ryan Gosling’s scorn.

Souvenir, a typeface first designed by American type designer Morris Fuller Benton and then revived 50 years later by the legendary Ed Benguiat while working at the International Typeface Corporation (ITC), is such a bugbear. At the height of its popularity, it was a typeface so thoroughly loathed that type historian Simon Garfield has called it the “Comic Sans of its day.”

Yet chances are, if you’re a nostalgic member of Generation X, you probably wonder how anyone could hate Souvenir. This is, after all, the typeface that the book text of Choose Your Own Adventure novels was set in, of early Dungeons and Dragons manuals and the covers of Bee Gees albums: an accessible serif that feels like the typographic soul of the ’70s and early ’80s. A round, friendly serif, Souvenir somehow has the meticulous yet lowbrow feeling of one of your grandmother’s cross-stitched pillowcases. Like Comic Sans, it became popular because it felt approachable and unpresumptuous; also like Comic Sans, it became ubiquitous because of technology, then hated for that ubiquity.

Souvenir somehow has the meticulous yet lowbrow feeling of one of your grandmother’s cross-stitched pillowcases.

Before personal computers introduced desktop publishing to the masses, phototypesetting — also known as composition—was the great leveler in printing. By essentially projecting type onto the page with the use of filmstrips containing a complete copy of a font, phototypesetting allowed small publishers to establish large, flexible font libraries for a fraction of the cost of buying metal type.

One of the largest sellers of phototype was ITC, which began adapting metal typefaces into phototype families that could be sold at affordable prices to small publishers. One of the fonts that received this treatment was Souvenir, which had first been released in 1914, then largely forgotten. In 1967, Benguiat—designer of ITC Benguiat (the Stranger Things font) as well as the logotypes for Playboy, Esquire, and more—adapted Souvenir for phototype in 1967, fleshing it out with additional weights and swashes. The finished version was rechristened ITC Souvenir and quickly became popular enough that ITC sold it for pretty much every photocomposition machine on the market.

On Bill Gates’s first business card, everything but his company name is in Souvenir.

This is the low-tech ’70s analog to the ascendancy of Comic Sans, which popped up everywhere due to the fact that it came pre-installed on every computer running Windows 95. Soon, ITC Benguiat was everywhere, from the cover of Peter Benchley’s Jaws to Bill Gates’s first business card. Just like Cooper Black defines the feel of the late ’60s and early ’70s, ITC Benguiat feels like the typeface a printout of the DNA of the ’70s and early ’80s would be set in.

“Souvenir was very typical for the 70s,” type designer Erik Spiekermann tells me over email. “Ed Benguiat applied his typical style to a Morris Fuller Benton face from the turn of the century which may itself have been inspired by a German face from that time. Like all Ed’s faces, it is not modest. It has generous curves and explicit shapes — a little overdone like most ITC faces at the time. It is well drawn and was very successful because it hit a nerve when Art Nouveau experienced a short but hot revival. If you like 70s flared trousers, colourful prints and tight shirts, you like ITC Souvenir.”

Of course, not everyone loves flared trousers… sometimes not even the people who made their living off of selling pants to John Travolta. Mark Batty, the former CEO of ITC itself, loathed Souvenir, calling it a “terrible typeface” and “a sort of Saturday Night Fever typeface wearing tight white flared pants.” And he’s hardly alone. Through the ’80s and ’90s, the backlash against ITC Souvenir became fierce, with ’90s type critic Guy Romano memorably saying of the font: “We could send Souvenir to Mars, but there are international treaties on pollution in outer space.”

Pretty soon, it became just as fashionable among type lovers to shit on ITC Souvenir as it is today to disparage Papyrus and Comic Sans, despite the fact that it is nowhere near as over the top or misused as those typefaces. Perhaps the fairest characterization I’ve seen of ITC Souvenir comes from Allan Haley, who described Souvenir in his 1990 book ABCs of Type as “like Times New Roman dipped in chocolate.” In other words, it’s a bonbon of a font: maybe a little cloying but unworthy of outright hatred.

Yet the stigma around ITC Souvenir persists today amongst type designers, says Nadine Chahine, formerly of Monotype and founder of Arabic Type . “Yes, designers like to hate this typeface, even though there is nothing objectively more terrible about this than countless other typefaces,” she tells me. “Sometimes it’s fashionable to hate a typeface, though one learns to avoid that with time. But as with other powerful emotions, hate is something that is guttural. I expect that this is a case of familiarity breeds contempt rather than anything wrong with the typeface itself.”

Thankfully, after decades of ignominy, ITC Souvenir may be slated for a comeback. “I think Souvenir is hated solely due to its overuse during a particular time period — it feels dated and stuck in the 1970s,” says Typewolf’s Jeremiah Shoaf. “But to a younger audience, I think it has a certain retro charm. Burton snowboards were recently using it in their branding.” Nor are they alone. The Ballast Point Brewing Company uses Souvenir on their well-known Sculpin India Pale Ale. And while Chobani’s widely admired new brand identity uses a custom typeface, Chobani Serif, it feels very much like it owes a spiritual debt to ITC Souvenir.

ITC Souvenir is a reminder that most widely hated fonts aren’t genuinely bad, they just become unfashionable through ubiquity and misuse. It’s also a reminder that any font can have a comeback, even today’s most well-known typographical pariahs. Comic Sans may be hated now, but fashion is cyclical. And just like flared trousers have made a comeback after decades of scorn, ITC Souvenir shows us that Comic Sans may be only 20 years away from its social redemption. God help us.

Magenta is a publication of Huge.