#typefaces

[longreads]

What’s Your Type? A Reading List on Typefaces with Wild Tales to Tell

Follow Kanya Kanchana down the typeface rabbit hole! Today, she bring us a reading list of seven stories highlighting our love affair with typefaces. 

I found out early that I had a love for letters, scripts, and the art of making them. As a student of architecture involved in literary-type activities in college, I drew posters for years, made design drawings, read a lot, discovered a dubious ability to write in a great number of convincing hands, resisted putting it to criminal use, and stumbled upon a body of knowledge about type. I had caught the bug. I had fallen in love with Aldus Manutius, if not with Johannes Gutenberg. And when I became a programmer, I got to play with type. If it was good enough for Steve Jobs, it wasn’t perhaps all that mad.

[elliespectacular]

How do you identify fonts used in your sources?

https://www.myfonts.com/pages/whatthefont is a handy web page that'll identify a font from a picture. The clarity should at least be decent for good results, but it's helped me out more times than I can count!

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

The Overbrook Press was founded in 1934 by American financier turned fine-press publisher Frank Altschul (1887-1981), with Margaret B. Evans (1903-1986) as the designer, compositor, and printer. The press continued operations until 1969. One of the first publications printed at the press was this little keepsake specimen book for friends, The Types, Borders, Rules, & Devices of the Press, printed in Stamford, Connecticut in an edition of 150 copies in 1934.

Our copy, another donation from the estate of our late friend Dennis Bayuzick, bears a signed presentation from Margaret B. Evans to the noted typographer and book designer Abe Lerner (1929-2002) and his wife Kit Currie (d. 2014) in 1980.

View more posts on books from the Overbrook Press.

View our other Typography Tuesday posts.

[studio--io]

Modular concept typography ioD©MMXXV

[power-chords]

The Doves Type legend is one of the most enduring in typographic history and probably the most infamous. It’s the story of a typeface and a bitter feud between the two partners of Hammersmith’s celebrated Doves Press, Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker, leading to the protracted disposal of their unique metal type into London’s River Thames. Starting in 1913 with the initial dumping of the punches and matrices, by the end of January 1917 an increasingly frail Cobden-Sanderson had made hundreds of clandestine trips under cover of darkness to Hammersmith Bridge and systematically thrown 12lb parcels of metal type into the murky depths below. As one person so aptly commented on Twitter recently, this notorious tale bears all the hallmarks of a story by Edgar Allan Poe.

The original Doves Type was crafted by master punchcutter Edward Prince, based on drawings produced by Percy Tiffin of Nicolas Jenson’s pioneering 15th-century Venetian type. William Morris, founder of the Kelmscott Press, had actually developed his own ‘Golden’ type some years before The Doves Press came into being but Doves is held by experts as being more faithful to the original Venetian letterforms.

The Doves Type was commissioned in 1899 and created solely by Prince in 16 pt; it was used in all of the press’s publications including their iconic edition of the King James Bible. Each Doves Press book was beautifully bound and, notes Green, noticeably “stripped of decorative borders and illustration, the elegantly clear & legible type acting alone as visual siren-song.”

By 1908, despite successful Milton prints and the aforementioned Bible, the Press was in dire financial difficulty. Subscribers began melting away after Walker had effectively left in 1906 as the bitter & acrimonious dispute took hold between the partners. On finally dissolving their partnership in 1909, Cobden-Sanderson began attempts to wriggle out of an earlier promise that, should the partnership cease, Walker would receive a fount of type ‘for his own use’. Walker retaliated, issuing a writ insisting that the Press shut down completely and he receive 50% of remaining assets. In 1909, the Press’s only valuable asset was the type.

A compromise was reached, brokered by their exasperated friend Sir Sydney Cockerell, which allowed Cobden-Sanderson uncontrolled use of the type for as long as he lived, at which time it would pass to Emery Walker, if he did not die first.

The thought of ‘his’ typeface being used by anyone else, and in a manner beyond his control, prompted Cobden-Sanderson’s now infamous course of action. Only the Doves Press, run exclusively by him, could be bestowed the honour of printing his type. And so the mission to destroy it, beginning with the punches and matrices on Good Friday 1913, began. On an almost nightly basis from August 1916 the ailing septuagenarian dumped the type into the Thames, wrapped in paper parcels and tied with string; “bequeathed to the river” as he put it in his personal diary. Every piece of this beautiful typeface, more than a ton of metal, was destroyed in a prolonged ritual sacrifice.

—Raised from the dead: The Doves Type story, 2013

After working on a revised digital facsimile Robert Green decided that he would try and find some of the original metal type. Using the sources available, including Cobden-Sanderson's published journals, Mr Green worked out where he thought the type was thrown from the bridge into the Thames.

At low tide, and with a mudlarkers licence, he scoured the Thames foreshore and found three pieces of the original type.

Due to the dangerous nature of the Thames currents and tides a team of professional divers from the Port of London Authority then spent two days looking for more type and a total of 150 pieces were recovered.

—One man's obsession with rediscovering a lost typeface, BBC News, 2015

[bismutharts]

some fonts! they're all findable online somewhere, save for the font from my own handwriting. i wrote the name of the font and then a unique pangram every time. it was a struggle to find this many pangrams! i hope that this can help you if you're looking for a font :)

i downloaded a Lot of fonts with hearts for a project once so they got a full spread

errata: i accidentally forgot the h in lathi. the last heart font is called lathi

this is part of my project to make a zine a day in april

[zoedotgov]

Not Beatles posters, but here's a font I designed for my typography class! introducing cleodile. I made it with fontstruct to its a little blocky lol.

[synandsym]

[mrkoppa]

23 March 2025 | The Typographic Library, Winterbourne House, University of Birmingham 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Specimen pamphlet for the Venus type face from the Bauer Type Foundry (Germany), date unknown, but sometime after the release of Venus in 1907. England dingle, mandolin blouse.

[stone-cold-groove]

Open come in.

[smashorpassobjects2]

[skairart]

Had fun with new typefaces! Print without watermark is available at my shop

Ko-Fi Commissions | Prints | Linktree

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

WOOD-ENGRAVED INITIALS FORM MILLER & RICHARD

Displayed here are some wood-engraved historiated and ornamental initials from the Edinburgh type foundry Miller & Richard. The foundry was established by William Miller in 1809. His son-in-law Walter Richard joined the firm in 1832. It remained in continuous operation until 1952 when matrices for a few types were acquired by Stephenson, Blake & Co.

The specimens shown here are from a Miller & Richard type sample book published in Edinburgh in the late 1870s.

View more type specimen books.

View our other Typography Tuesday posts.

[studio--io]

Allude type in ascii ioD©MMCCV

[the-book-design]

You Spin Me Round by – wonderyears.studio