Why the Wingdings font exists (2015)

Letraset was the only way to get professional typography in the 1970s (and most of the 1980s) without resorting to a professional typesetter. The whole technical design and architectural design world was consumed by Letraset and any home or office that, say, owned a set of Rotring pens and a few french curves would also have sheets of Letraset and a Letraset catalogue (or three).

As well as sheets of all moder typefaces, Letraset had sheets of icons and useful decals including all the things in the Dingbats font (plus much more). You could buy sheets of pointing hands, trees, traffic, washing label icons, stars, ornaments, hatching, ... Google images has a lot of examples of these kinds of Letraset.

As a child of the 1970s I was obsessed with Letraset. My friends and I would pour over the catalogues like we would a Lego catalogue or a Littlewoods (postal shopping catalogue). Letraset was expensive.

As a young adult I was simultaneously wowed by the freedom (and cheap price) of Dingbat fonts and clipart disks while being appalled at the low quality of the artwork. I wondered why Letraset hadn't immediately jumped into the computerised world, like, say Pantone managed to. Did Letraset enforce copyrights to keep clip art so poor?

I suspect there is a much more interesting story here somewhere.

Did the penguin had it?

In the context of type, ornamentations were thus called dingbats because they were essentially pointless, of no substance.