User:Linden/Gothic, Blackletter and Fraktur
Some fonts are labelled Gothic, blackletter or fraktur. The word Gothic is sometimes used to distinguish the typeface from Italic or Roman, although some consider blackletter a synonym for Gothic. The OED defines fraktur as Germanic blackletter.
These faces allow letters to be placed densely upon a page because the letters are narrow (or "condensed") and this saves money where materials are expensive. The trade-off is that they are harder to read.
These fonts evolved for hand-written documents, but mad crazy Gutenberg used similar faces for similar reasons and some of the earliest texts we process use them (which can result in them becoming type-in projects).
When working on a project that uses such a face you may find these links helpful: