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While the correct answer with 66 bars is obvious and nicely symmetrical it did bother me.
I spent a happy half hour going through images of font sets and I could not find one with both the first and last characters with the form used here.
At the end of the day I don’t think it matters and the symmetry is crucial.
A brilliant puzzle.

Brilliant puzzle! And a nicely straightforward gridfill for once.

Thanks to whoever suggested drawing the bars in an empty grid - I was struggling to spot anything with my pencilled newspaper copy…

Will have another bash at CE from a couple years of weeks back now

Can I get (more of) a hint on how to approach putting the bars in please.

I’ve got the theme, blanks, originators (and I suspect I know what the answer is), but I am at a complete loss as to how to even begin to put the bars in..

cube - the bars are already there, you just need to decide which ones to delete

Using a blank grid may help you to see it as others have said

This website lets you easily produce a grid

https://codepen.io/dcwarwick/full/wvdebxB

Wow - I was looking at it completely the wrong way. Thank you!

I've trawled all the way through the posts and no-one seems to have expressed uncertainty about how to "fill the blank cells to complete a thematic title".
Since the blank cells are not contiguous, it seems that you can fill them from west to east OR from north to south. The latter seems more logical given what is required to complete the thematic title, but either would seem feasible, unless the incorrect choice would have an impacts on the rest of the endgame.
Having found the originators, I'd like to be clear about the above before attempting to tackle the 66 bar conundrum.

There are two thematic titles. The one in the grid fixes the position of the letters in the blank cells