New Font: Aylward
I seem to still be operating in the mode of fonts based on Victorian era advertising cuts, and Aylward fits in that tradition, based on several variants of the same style of wood type. Aylward is a bold display face with exaggerated serifs and some unusual features like the really unique design of the “A” and the spiral forms on the “S” and “G” characters. Aylward offers a trule unique and antique look but is very readable and striking without being too heavy or overly ornate.
It also includes not just a single style, but also a variant with spurs on the ascenders and curves of the characters. Because this is a display face it has no proper lowercase, so the standard font includes the spurred characters on the uppercase and the plain characters as the lowercase. As a bonus there is also a custom outline version of the font which can be bought separately or is included packaged with the main font, so it’s like getting three fonts in one.
You can download and try the demo version of Aylward in TrueType format for Mac or PC. It includes a mix of characters from the different variants of the font. You can also order the full version online for immediate download: BUY IT NOW.


Folkard Font Manifested on Ghost Whisperer
I was scanning through the television channels tonight and stumbled on a show on CBS called Ghost Whisperer. It seemed to have something to do with Willard
(sans Ben and sans Michael Jackson theme music) trying to steal a magical book away from the perky teen girl from Party of Five
and the second least funny comedian to ever have be featured on The Comedy Channel now that Demetri Martin has a show.
Anyway, inbetween the starlet’s bosom heaving and Willard’s desperate attempts to conjure the ghost of Ben out of the shadows in a dark alley using the force of excessive thespianism, they featured a good shot of the mystical book in question and lo and behold, on the title page it features a lovely example of our Folkard font limning the title The Book of Changes which I thought was a Chinese fortune telling system, but turns out to be a book whose pages magically write and unwrite themselves at inconvenient times, causing Willard to explode, which is still better than being smeared with peanut butter and covered with rats.
The show is basically whipped brain squeezings, but it was nice to see Folkard on TV in an appropriate context.
The World of Eric Sloane
This is an update of an article we originally published in 2005. Additional links have been added, especially at the end of the article.
My grandfather made tools. So did my great-grandfather and his father and all his fathers before him back to a distant ancestral blacksmith working under a tree in medieval Scotland. This and my training as a historian and my current profession as a type designer, gives me an inevitable affection and reverence for legendary American artist Eric Sloane and all of the aspects of his work.
Eric Sloane was one of the most interesting artistic figures of the 20th century, even though in many ways his work harkened back to an earlier era. He was like the Howard Pyle of his generation, displaying a multitude of literary and artistic talents which came together in brilliant and unique works which stand alone as embodiments of the art and craft of design. Sloane was a remarkable landscape and skyscape painter — one of his sky murals graces the walls of the main hall at the Smithsonian Air and Space museum — but he is best known for his books on various aspects of history, craft and American tradition — books featuring not only his evocative illustrations, but his unique hand-lettered titles and insightful distillations of history and practical philosophy from the perspective of a craftsman.
Read more
Classic Font: Stuttgart Gothic
Stuttgart Gothic is a super-bold gothic calligraphy font which we first released in 1998. It is based on samples of German poster lettering from the early 20th century, which were in turn based on historical samples from 16th century manuscripts. It’s a very strong font, with lots of ornamental features. For this new release we’ve added some new special characters and useful refinements. Stuttgart is featured in our Gothic Fonts package along with many other fonts from the gothic tradition.
You can try the demo version of Stuttgart Gothic for free, or order the full version online for immediate download.

Font Literacy at the National Gallery of Art

Over the holidays I got to travel with my family to visit my parents in Washington DC. While there, as always, we took time out to visit the National Gallery of Art. We saw some great exhibits. The kids liked the exhibition of Spanish Armor, but I found the strange and melancholy art of The Darker Side of Light to be the most interesting.

Of course, while we were there we spent some time in the gallery’s fantastic gift shops which are loaded with art prints, cards, art-based knick knacks, reproductions and lots of books on art and artists. Inevitably some of those books and products featured our fonts, like Swords: An Artist’s Devotion
which used our Kelmscott font for the cover title and a number of our fonts, including Windlassfor interior titles as well. It was also interesting to see our Carmilla font used as the title font for a colletion of art cards of Great Nudes
.

What was most striking among the products on sale at the National Gallery stores was the lack of font literacy on the part of the publishers and designers. You would think that when publishing a book or other product based on the work of an artist like William Morris or Alphons Mucha the authors or the designers of the book or product would know enough about the artist whose work they are presenting to be aware that those artists were also notable for their font design or original hand lettering. Yet my eye was caught again and again by examples of products whose designers seemed fundamentally ignorant of the availability of appropriate fonts to compliment the art which they were presenting. A couple of examples stand out. One was a very nice wall calendar from the Brooklyn Museum of Art based on William Morris Arts & Crafts Designs
which could have used a William Morris font like our Kelmscott or True Golden, but instead opted for a pretty but unrelated generic art nouveau font. Similarly, a collection of William Morris Giftwrap
opted for a plain text font when a Morris font would have been much more appropriate.

Along the same lines, but perhaps somewhat less of a failing were the collections of postcards based on the work of various artists which use their signatures for a title. That’s reasonable in some cases, but it seems like a failing when the artist is Alphons Mucha who did so many lovely hand lettered posters and whose work has been made into some very popular fonts including the eight included in our extensive Mucha collection. That package would have looked much better with Slava or Moravian on the cover.
I may be hypersensitive to this issue, but it just seems logical to me to use the most appropriate fonts possible when presenting the work of an artist, and if that artist was a calligrapher or did remarkable and unique lettering or even designed type, then what excuse does an author or designer who is presenting his work have for not being aware of that and using appropriate fonts? It seems like a disservice to the artist’s legacy and to the public to overlook that aspect of his art. It’s probably too much to expect, but it also seems like a failing on the part of the museum store. Shouldn’t their buyer, who probably got a nice degree in Art History from a respectable college, also be aware of this issue, and when faced with a choice between products pick the one packaged with appropriate fonts rather than with some random alternative?
There seems to be a lack of basic font litreracy here. Are the art and design schools not teaching anything about the history of typography or the work of these artists beyond the most obvious? Morris was the biggest figure in the Arts and Crafts movement. He wrote and painted and designed furniture and fabric and books and typefaces. No one of those things presents a full picture of his talent, so if you’ve studied Morris at all you ought to know about all of them and use that knowledge. I suppose the average consumer won’t know the difference, but they have the excuse of not having an education or working in the merchandising of art. And when the occasional knowledgeable person does see your work they may notice the flaw and then get grumpy and produce an article like this, for whatever that’s worth.
Mister Slaughter by Robert McCammon
After a career as one of the preeminent horror writers of the 1990s and a break which lasted for several years, Robert McCammon has come back with a vengeance, completely reinventing his career, with an impressive series of historical mysteries set in the American colonies in the early 18th century. The stories center on the adventures of legal clerk and freelance investigator Matthew Corbett which began in Speaks the Nightbird, an extraordinary novel which McCammon had not intended to make into a series, but he liked the setting and the characters so much that after making a few chronological revisions he followed it with The Queen of Bedlam
and now with a third installment in Mister Slaughter
.
Mister Slaughter. Continues the story of Corbett’s work for the Herald Agency based out of New York City, working in partnership with the gruff but formidable Hudson Greathouse. This book picks up directly where The Queen of Bedlam
ends, with Corbett and Greathouse taking a commission to retrieve notorious mass murderer Tyranthus Slaughter from a madhouse in Pennsylvania and bring him to New York for transport to England to face justice. Of course, the task of retrieving and delivering the abhorrent Slaughter doesn’t work out as expected, and the story developes into a grueling pursuit through frontier settlements, indian villages and the centers of colonial civilization, uncovering a shadowy criminal network of which Slaughter is just a part.
The story of Mister Slaughter is engaging and moves along quickly, but what really makes the book stand out is McCammon’s attention to developing interesting and complex characters, including his exploration of the nuances of the historical environment which plays a very large role in making the novels in this series as interesting and unique as they are. Corbett gets a lot of development, with his flaws and his virtues placed in striking contrast. He’s heroic and capable yet flawed and troubled at the same time. The book is very much a journey towards a new level of maturity for Corbett as a character. Slaughter also makes an unexpected kind of villain who turns out to be both more and less than you expect him to be by the time the book is done. There’s room in the book for a couple of interesting subplots, some curious secondary characters and a bit of a surprise ending which clearly sets up the next book in the series.
All of this is held together by McCammon’s masterful writing skills, which have evolved and adapted to his material, with undertones of James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving which give the novel an authentic period feel which should make better known and well established historical novelists jealous. Though I heartily recommend Mister Slaughter both as a work of historical fiction and as a mystery novel, I have to warn squeamish readers that there are scenes and situations which are quite graphic and disturbing on the level of the works of Richard Laymon and Clive Barker and if that sort of gore and violence bothers you, read something else. As for me, I’m looking forward to McCammon’s next novel of adventure and mystery in Matthew Corbett’s world.
And for the record, the book features excellent cover art with the title done in our Allegheny font.
New Font: Andrano
Once again I have fallen under the influence of my fashion conscious teenage daughter, who tells me that I absolutely must produce more “shabby chic” fonts like the trendy scrapbookers and hip fashion label designers use. On showing her examples this turns out to mean more circus style fonts with wide ascenders and decoration. We did this dance once before the the Cascade font and she wasn’t entirely satisfied. It was too Art Deco and not crude enough looking.
So, against my natural inclination to tweak everything to perfection I found some sample letters from a 19th century poster and developed a full alphabet from them without pushing too hard for perfect lines and symmetry. The result is the new Andrano font with a name picked because there’s something sort of Italian looking about the font. It features wide and ornate characters with jewel-like internal embellishments and a subtle built-in shadow to give the illusion of depth. The upper case characters are somewhat skewed and misaligned versions of the standard character set. So far my teenaged adviser is fairly pleased with it and she claims that because of her influence it will be a sure bestseller, so here it is.
You can download and try the demo version of Antrobus in TrueType format for Mac or PC. You can also order the full version online for immediate download: BUY IT NOW.

Charles Folkard’s Ring of the Nibelungs

We’ve been working on a collection of art and fonts based on the designs of classic illustrator Charles Folkard — best known for illustrating Pinnochio — for a very long time. It’s been a slow process becaust good examples of Folkard’s art and lettering are relatively hard to find. Although he was a contemporary of Arthur Rackham, he wasn’t nearly as well known, nor did he develop the kind of intense fanbase which Rackham still enjoys today. Nonetheless, Folkard was an excellent artist and arguably much more creative as a calligrapher and page designer than Rackham was.
Of course, our Folkard collection has already produced one of our most successful fonts. The Folkard font has appeared everywhere, in movies and on book titles and product packaging. We’re also working on several other Folkard fonts, including one based on his lettering from The Jackdaw of Rheims.
We’re also adding new art to the collection as we find it and are getting close to the point where we ought to be able to release the package commercially sometime this year. Much of the art is mythological and on Germanic and Scandinavian themes. You can see samples and download large-size versions of four illustrations here. They are from the Folkard illustrated edition of Ring of the Nibelungs, which is perhaps less ambitious than Rackham’s illustrated edition of the Wagner opera, but has some good examples of Folkard’s vivid color and clearly drawn characters.
Look for the Folkard font and art package to premiere sometime this Summer.
MapMaker Collection

Making functional and attractive maps is a very specialized skill, prized by game designers, roleplayers and artists. To make exceptional maps, you need to have the right tools. Our MapMaker font and art package provide the fonts, textures and emblems which make drawing floorplans and developing stylish world and regional maps a breeze. Our map resources are based on the designs of classic cartographers like Abraham Ortelius and Johan Hondius give your maps a unique antique look which will inspire the imagination.
The core of the collection is the extraordinary collection of more than fifteen original fonts specially created for cartographic design. They include fonts for mapping terrain, fonts of complete building plans, fonts for designing buildings and a selection of cartographic lettering fonts.
Basilica is a font of architectural elements fordesigning floorplans of churches, castles, houses and other buildings. It includes a variety of wall thicknesses, windows, doors, stairs and other essential pieces which you can easily assemble in any graphics or desktop publishing program to create impressive, easy to understand layouts for anything from a hut to a palace to a house by house map of a city.
The characters in Ortelius can be combined to make traditional geographical maps in an antique style. They include segments of coastline and rivers which can be combined in thousands of different patterns, plus city, town and fortification emblems, terrain symbols, compass symbols and everything else you need for a high-quality map of your world or key parts of it.
Our Landscape fonts are a pair of fonts containing landscape symbols, images and textures ideal for adding details to your maps and plans, such as trees, rocks, terrain features and other important elements of the environment. It’s excellent for architectural plans and building layouts.

Cityscape is mainly a decorative font, but it can add flair to your maps and plans. Each character is the silhouette of a building and they can be combined to create a complete panorama of a city. Samarkand is a decorative building silhouette font like Cityscape, but with a middle eastern theme. It includes mosques and towers and all the elements of a medieval islamic city.

Our three floorplan fonts include Temples, Castles and Houses. Each font includes a large selection of complete building floorplans which you can access with a few key clicks. Plans include original designs and notable historic buildings, mostly medieval and renaissance designs. The floorplans of temples, churches and cathedrals are particularly impressive.
The package also includes a selection of fonts for doing the titles and labels on your maps, plus several select highly decorative cartographic calligraphy fonts. The six main title fonts were selected for readability and for their historical accuracy for the era of exploration.
Brandywine is based on the lettering of Howard Pyle and is very clear and readable in small sizes, despite having a hand-drawn look. Queensland is a bold, hand-drawn italic font ideal for titles and captions. Windlass is a bold titling font with an antique look ideal for headings and large captions. In some of the alternate character locations it includes decorative map elements with a pirate theme. Buccaneer is based on hand lettering by Howard Pyle for his Book of Pirates. Walsingham is very similar to the lettering style favored by 16th century English mapmakers. Pavane is similar to the style of continental mapmakers like Abraham Ortelius. All six fonts are versatile and are similar to typefaces and lettering styles used on historical maps of the 15th and 16th centuries. Also featured in the package are the new fonts Platthand, John Speed and Hexmap.


The LITE version of the package includes just the fonts for only $59. The PLUS version includes all the fonts, plus a large selection of color design elements and over a hundred antique maps for only $89. The current release is the new 5th edition of the package. Just ORDER ONLINE.
To get an idea of what our MapMaker fonts are like, try out the demo version of our Floorplan fonts. It combines selected floorplans from all three of our Floorplan fonts. You might also want to check out a set of sample maps or try our map design tutorial.
Classic Font: Gaiseric
We first released Gaiseric back in 1998. It was developed from samples of stylized gothic calligraphy, redrawn freehand in a rough style to give an extra antique look. Stylistically it derives from fonts like our more historic Melusine font, but it has a more fanciful, artistic look. Ths makes it perfect for inclusion in our forthcoming Fairy Fonts and Art package which is scheduled for release this Spring. This updated version of Gaiseric includes a full standard upper and lower case character set plus numbers, punctuation and variant versions of many of the upper case characters.
You can try the demo version of Gaiseric for free, or order the full version online.

Our new Art Deco font collection includes a remarkable selectiion of fonts from the design movements of the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on the kinds of fonts which were generally associated with the decorative arts movement which developed out of the Arts and Crafts movement.
Our Wild West font collection features 14 fonts based on designs from the classic days of the American West (1870-1890). They are typical of the type and lettering styles used in signs, circulars, posters and newspapers during that era. The selection includes both decorative, display and text fonts. All the fonts are historically accurate and they are not available from any other source. While they are basically fonts of the Victorian era, they represent a subset of the typefaces popular in that period particularly slanted to the environmnet of the wild west, frontier newspapers and wild west shows.
The art of the Pre-Raphaelites recreated classical and legendary themes, fascination with architectural elements and realistic drapery, and the use of models who fit a particular style and appearance, usually with thick, curly hair and voluptuous figures. Our Pre-Raphaelite collection features select images from the most prominent artists of the movement in high-resolution suitable for use in print.
Or latest collection based on one of Walter Crane's childrens book is our comprehensive presentation of The Baby’s Opera, Crane's compilation of childrens songs (including music and lyrics) with detailed illustrations, hand lettering and clever decorations on every page. Many of the designs and motifs can easily be extracted for use in your own designs.
You've got to have text fonts, so wny not make them interesting and unique rather than the same old boring set that come with every computer. Our Text Fonts Collection has more variety and more style than you'll find anywhere else.
Howard Pyle was one of the most renowned illustrators of the 19th century. His work was widely published in adventure novels, magazines and romances. He was the founder of the Brandywine school and artists colony in Chadd's Ford Pennsylvania, where he taught artists like N. C. Wyeth, Frank Schoonover and Thornton Oakley their craft. Our Pyle collection includes a large selection of Pyle's art and designs plus original fonts based on his hand lettering.
In the Middle Ages the demand for written documents required new and better forms of writing, styles which were readable, consistent, efficient to produce, and sometimes decorative as well. This package features a selection of fonts and art based on designs from the Middle Ages, emphasizing the years from 1100 to 1400. The 25 fonts include versions of the major popular lettering styles of this period and the art includes beautiful borders, frames and other decorative elements based on medieval designs.
Howard Pyle’s illustrated edition of Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott is probably the single greatest expression of book design in the American arts and crafts movement of the late 19th century. This early Pyle work combines his vivid illustrative style with exceptional decoration and lettering into a modern illuminated masterpiece. Our Lady of Shalott CD package has every page from the book in high resolution format, including the decorated verses, the full-page illustrations and the embellished titles and flyleaves. It also includes extracted and instantly usable versions of the initials, illustrations background patterns, borders and frames from the book.
This collection brings together all of our best fonts based on Art Nouveau period designs into an extensive collection, with over 30 unique fonts, including text, title faces and even decorative initials. This includes new fonts created just for this package plus classics in the Art Nouveau tradition. It also features a bonus collection of frames and borders based on designs from magazines and books of the period. Altogether it makes the ultimate resource for Art Nouveau style design.
About once a year we release a special sampler package with a collection of selected fonts and art from our most recent and forthcoming packages, including some unique items not available anywhere else, all brought together as an overview of what we've been up to at the Scriptorium during the past year at a special, extremely low price. This latest sampler has four complete new fonts, 15 demo fonts and a special selection of art and graphics which includes a special set of illustrations of Celtic mythology by Katherine Cameron.
This collection presents calligraphy and art based on the traditions of historic Germanic cultures. It draws on the broad scope of early Germanic design, from the pre-Christian era through the early middle ages, including not just Scandinavia, but other elements of Germanic culture from the Franks to the Saxons to the Normans and beyond. The main component is a collection of historic fonts which is complemented by a unique set of historic borders and motifs, plus art based on Viking myth and legend.
A collection of our best fonts based on gothic type and late medieval calligraphy. It covers the range from the historical styles in which gothic printing had its inspiration to the ornate heights of complex gothic fonts from 19th century Germany. This includes fonts in the style sometimes called 'Old English', as well as what calligraphers sometimes call 'Black Letter'. If you like your fonts dark, angular and complex, this is your dream collection. 





































