Art Deco Font Collection
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. More...Wild West Fonts
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.More...Pre-Raphaelite Collection
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.More...The Baby’s Opera Collection
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. More...Text Fonts Collection
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. More...Howard Pyle Fonts and Art
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. More...Medieval Fonts and Art
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. DETAILSThe Lady of Shalott
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. DETAILSArt Nouveau Collection
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. DETAILS2009 Sampler
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. DETAILSViking Fonts and Art
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. DETAILS.Gothic Fonts
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. DETAILS
Some clever Dutch fellows at a company called SPRANQ (of all things) came up with the idea to produce an EcoFont designed to print using 20% less ink and thereby save the entire ecosystem, the world and our childrens future. But after spending about $100 to replace the cartridges in my wife’s photo-quality inkjet which gets used to print a lot of school assignments and paperwork most of the time, it occured to me that just saving 20% may be nice symbolically, but doesn’t do enough for my bottom line.
So, since designing fonts is what I do, it was off to the drawing board to come up with a font which can save even more ink. The problem with EcoFont is that it uses a single line of relatively large white spots to reduce ink consumption. My approach was to effectively pixilate the font by changing it from solid black to a grid pattern of about half black and half white squares and instead of just a few large white areas, the average character has about a hundred tiny white blocks. We think that the end result should be a savings of about 40% on ink consumption with a readable font which still looks black at point sizes up to about 36 point. The font is based on our popular Onuava font, and works best when used at 9 or 10 point size.
InkSaver is free to download, as our holiday gift to font users everywhere. It’s in TrueType format for MacOS or Windows. A single font probably isn’t going to save the world all by itself, but at least you can spend the money you save on ink on something fun for the holidays, or perhaps on more fun fonts. 
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Classic Font: Pyle Gothic
From out of the distant past, we bring one of our very oldest fonts, back in a revised and improved version, rescued from the mists of obscurity. Pyle Gothic was first released in 1993 and was our first font based on the lettering of legednary illustrator Howard Pyle. It’s taken from samples of his crude woodcut gothic title and caption lettering from his The Story of King Arthur and His Knights
You can download and try the demo version of Pyle Gothic in TrueType format for Mac or PC. The full version of the font is available from our ordering site.
Review: New Books from James Blaylock
Sometimes it may seem like what I write here comes a bit out of left field, but rest assured there’s always method to my madness. In this case a bit of foreshadowing, or laying the groundwork for what’s to come a bit down the road.
Which brings us the James Blaylock and his work, including his most recent novel, The Knights of the Cornerstone
The Knights of the Cornerstone is the story of would-be cartoonist Calvin Bryson, who gets a call from a relative who wants him to take a family heirloom out into the desert to his uncle who lives in New Cypress, a peculiar desert resort town on the Arizona border. Cal takes on the task and finds more than he expected in New Cypress, a town where everyone seems to be a member of the mysterious Knights of the Cornerstone, and which is under siege by dangerous enemies who want to control the occult secrets the Knights guard in their temple. He has to choose whether to continue to stand aside and observe life, or pick a side and fight for something he believes in. Blaylock does an excellent job developing the main characters and making them interesting, especially the character of the town of New Cypress itself. There’s considerably more direct action than there is in most of Blaylock’s novels, especially towards the end when the story comes to a head in a series of violent clashes between the Knights of the Cornerstone and those who want to plunder their secrets. There’s also a bit of romance to round things out.
The Knights of the Cornerstone is a good, quick read and perhaps more approachable for those unfamiliar with Blaylock’s style than some of his other more poetic and evocative novels. It has a more commercial character than much of his earlier writing, and it’s a strange irony that despite his excellent storytelling skills and readability, Blaylock has never found the mass market he deserves and as a result this novel was released by a specialty publisher, likely limiting its exposure and access to the audience which it deserves. Nonetheless, go get a copy. You won’t be disappointed.
Despite the contemporary themes of his most recent novels, those of you who are familiar with Blaylock’s work may be more familiar with him as one of the seminal authors in the Steampunk movement, where modern writers write science fiction from the in a Victorian setting using the science and technology of the pre-electric era, drawing on the tradition of Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells. Blaylock’s novels Homunculus
These two books come after several years of no new releases from Blaylock. However, the growing popularity of the Steampunk genre has led to new trade paperback releases of many of his classic novels, so they are widely available for the first time in years. Perhaps we’ll also see more new work from Blaylock soon.
New Font: Goldwork
Goldwork is a new font based on lettering designed for metalworking inscriptions in the 17th century. It’s in the tradition of other fonts we’ve done based on engraved letters like Monumental Initials and Engravers Gothic. It has some quirky characteristics which are unusual for late gothic lettering, as well as some strange carryovers from earlier styles, not surprising for a style which appeared in the early modern era contemporary with the transition from hand copied manuscripts to printing, leading to changes in lettering styles which carried over into other media.
Goldwork has a full character set with capitals and lowercase letters, plus numbers and punctuation. You can download and try out the free demo version of Goldwork (will work on Mac or PC). If you like it you can buy the complete character set with all the extra features from our Ordering Site.
Designing with Decorative Initials
Decorative Initials font consists of characters which combine basic letter forms with artistic embellishment, often in the form of floral or geometric patterns used as a background or intertwined with the letter. Decorative Initials have their origins in medieval manuscript decoration where complex and colorful characters were used to make a manuscript page more attractive. Most Decorative Initials fonts have their origins in the adaptation of this medieval concept to early typography, limiting them to complex two-color patterns, though in some cases these might be decorated after printing. Decorative Initials fonts are sometimes referred to as ‘Drop Caps’ because they are ‘dropped’ into a page of text.
ecause Decorative Initials characters are far more complex than the characters in a regular font, they present design problems and may present some difficulties for the end-user as well. This is particularly true when dealing with True Type fonts because of the limitations built into that format. All of the difficulties of designing Decorative Initials originate in their complexity. Characters in digital fonts are made up of points and vectors. A truly detailed initial may require hundreds of points, and in some cases even thousands. With an original font this can be controlled to some degree by making the characters less complex, but if you are adapting a font from a historical source (like many of the Scriptorium Decorative Initials fonts), the original source material may be too complex to simplify significantly. With all types of fonts complexity and large numbers of points means that the font will require more memory. This may create problems on both Macintosh and PC computers which do not have sufficient memory or where programs are not assigned sufficient memory to render the fonts on the screen. Similar problems may occur with printers which lack the memory to download these complex characters. And in most cases the more complex characters you use in a document the more problems you will run into. Usually font memory problems will be manifested by characters not printing or appearing on the screen in larger sizes. These problems are worse with TrueType fonts, because operating systems set an absolute limit on the complexity which a character can have. This limit may make it impossible to use some fonts at all.
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Seashore: Simple GIMP Image Editing for the Mac
When I previously reviewed the powerful but geeky GIMP image editor, I found fault with the difficulty of installation and unfamiliarity of the structure for novices and especially for Mac users. As it turns out, Mark Pazolli has adapted the basic GIMP engine to create Seashore, an image editor for the MacOS which addresses many of the concerns I had with GIMP. While the choice of names is somewhat inexplicable, the design is sound. Seashore is a user-friendly and simple image editor which is available for free and which offers essential image design capabilities as well as including some of the best advanced features of GIMP.
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