I think I can help you with where this typeface’s creator got the idea from. This w, where the left hand of the letter looks like an ’n’, was common in British roundhand calligraphy in the eighteenth century. You’ll find it in the major calligraphy manuals of the period-Charles Snell (this image, from an article by Paul Shaw), Bickham’s Universal Penman, Edward Cocker's The Pen’s Triumph of 1658, too. Although it’s not in Bowles’ italic alphabet. Most digital fonts, understandably, think it’s going to be hard to read and don’t use it, although as experts on Twitter have noted it’s more familiar if you know blackletter.
This is a “fat face” typeface, a kind of poster typeface that appeared in London just before 1810, and it was fun to see this image. I try to look after the font and typography articles on Wikipedia (same nom de dotcom), and I’ve recently been working up a draft article on fat face typefaces, and improving the one on Robert Thorne, who writers of the time said popularised them. I haven’t seen this ‘w’ on a fat face myself. But there aren’t a huge number of surviving specimen books from the period, making research quite difficult-especially right now! And I suppose it’s possible it’s a woodblock or custom engraving not a metal typeface anyway, in which case there’s no chance of tracking down its maker-printers of the period generally didn’t issue specimens of the materials they had in stock.
If you want to know more, though, the only person you want to contact is the digital font designer Paul Barnes in London. Not only has mentioned looking at this poster project on Twitter, he’s recently published a superb set of digital fat face typefaces, Brunel and the ultra-bold Isambard, for which he did a colossal amount of research, including looking at Thorne’s specimen of 1803 and one from 1810, in a private collection I believe. I was thinking of emailing him about it before this came up. You can read that here: https://commercialclassics.com/catalogue/isambard
