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
Edmund Dulac Collection
Edmund Dulac was one of the most prolific and most impressive illustrators of the early 20th century. His work covers a wide range of themes and styles, and is characterized by the strongly defined personality of the people he depicts and the elaborate backgrounds and shading of his scenes .
Dulac is best known for his illustrations of the Arabian Nights and various fairytales from Perrault, like Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella.
Our collection features many Dulac classics, but it also includes some of his most unusual work, like his eerie illustrations for Edgar Allen Poe’s The Bells and his beautiful plates from Shakespeare’s
Tempest.
Our Dulac package has recently been expanded and many new images have been added and older images in low resolution have been replaced by high-resolution, print quality images. As with all of our collections, the images are licensed to you for reprint or inclusion in other publications so long as you are not primarily reselling just the itself.
The complete Dulac package is only $59. The easiest way to get this package is to order it online and take delivery by immediate download. To order online, just CLICK HERE It’s also easy to order with our toll-free number at 1-800-797-8973. Alternatively, just send payment to: Ragnarok Press, POB 140333, Austin, TX 78722.
If you like Edmund Dulac, you will probably also like Sir William Russell Flint. You can find extensive samples of our Flint collection at IMAGES .
Classic Font: Ereshkigal
Ereshkigal was the dread crone of the underworld in ancient Mesopotamian mythology. She was the wife of the plague god Nergal and the judge of the dead. She was the dark counterpoint to her beautiful sister Ishtar. So when we made a font with a bit of the look of dried reeds and spider legs it seemed like her name fit it. The Ereshkigal font was first released in 2000 and has been revised once since then, plus for this new release we’ve added a set of special characters which include selected Mesopotamian holy symbols done in a style compatible with the lettering in the font. Ereshkigal combines an unusual stylized look with a high level of readability which makes it excellent for titles and decorative text.
In addition to the usual graphics which we do for new font releases, we put together a video priview for Ereshkigal which features the letters rising out of the desert sands in front of a traditional Mesopotamian ziggurat. Kind of fun. It even features evocative musical accompaniment.
You can try the demo version of Ereshkigal for free, or order the full version online.
The Dream Tarot Revisited
This article originally appeared in 2006. An additional card graphic has been added since the original article, based on the parameters established in the dream and representing the Hands suit which is not in the original graphic and featuring art by Walter Crane.
The other night I found myself sitting at a table with the crusty old men of the land of dreams, playing poker with tarot cards in the middle of a rundown circus. I suspect the dream was infused with bits of all sorts of memories – Sam Raimi’s film The Quick and the Dead, the extraordinary HBO show Carnivale and the great Hammer Film Vampire Circus, plus even a bit of Dario Argento’s Suspiria. My dreams tend to be cinematic and full of vivid visuals. I’ve been a heavy dreamer for years. I’ve even had serial dreams which have lasted for months at a time.
Dreams are hard to hold onto in the waking world, but I managed to remember the key parts of this one, because of the graphic images. I’m sitting at a table with a bunch of strange characters – including Lance Henrickson for some reason – and we’re all playing poker with a deck of cards which is somewhere between a normal deck and a tarot deck. The cards are unusual. They’re 3 inches wide and 6 inches high and made of a thick, worn bristol card stock, all crimped and rubbed, leading to a lot of problems dealing the proper number of cards, though no one seems to care. The designs on the cards are reminiscent of 60s era psychedelic rock posters, with dominating heavy-weight fonts framing an illustration. Their very stylized design is one of the memories which sticks with me the best. I’m losing for most of the game, but in the last two hands I come back with a small win followed by a major hand which I win with a high flush in Shades – that’s right, instead of Spades the deck has Shades.
On waking I made some notes to remind me of what I’d seen in the dream, with some vague notion of recreating the look of the cards in some way. I’m not at all sure I want to actually do the work involved in designing an entirely speculative tarot deck based on something from a dream, but I did work up some sample cards to see if I could capture the basic look, using fonts similar to those on the dream cards and borrowing some Howard Pyle art which fit the theme pretty well. I gave each suit a signature font. For Stars I picked Butterfield, for Trees I went with Belgravia, for Orbs I picked the recently released Furbelow font, for Shades I used Plowright and finally for the Hands suit Pantagruel seemed like a good choice.
The graphic above shows a finished card and bits of some others. I’m not sure if I’ll ever do more, but it was an interesting exercise, and the result ended up not being all that far from what I remember of the dream. To finish the job properly I’d likely need to commission original art closer to what I saw in the dream than the Pyle pieces I used in these samples, and maybe even design a new font or two, so it would be a big project to take on just to pull something out of the dream world and into the real world.
The Art of William Russell Flint
Sir William Russell Flint was the Artist Laureate to Queen Victoria at the end of her reign, and while he was highly regarded in his own era as one of the great artists of the time, his work has largely been forgotten today. However, he left behind a legacy of extraordinary illustrations on classical themes and we’ve preserved some of the best selections in our Flint collection.
Flint was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and also by stylized neoclassical art of the Renaissance. Many of his paintings have the appearance of classical friezes with very stylized composition and beautiful use of rich color and intriguing details.
Our collection is drawn from Flint’s three most famous series of illustrations, his plates for The Greek Heroes, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur. These are among his best and most beautiful works and show his skills in a variety of styles and themes.
Our Flint package has recently been expanded and many new images have been added, bringing the total to almost 80 high resolution, large-size images. Because of its size and the high resolution of the images it is only available on CD. The complete CD is normally $59, but is temporarily on special for only $49. As with all of our collections, the images are licensed to you for reprint or inclusion in other publications so long as you are not primarily reselling just the art itself.
The easiest way to get this package is to either order it online or from our toll-free number at 1-800-797-8973. Alternatively, just send payment to: Ragnarok Press, POB 140333, Austin, TX 78722. To order online just ORDER HERE
If you like Sir William Russell Flint, you will probably also like Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale. For samples of our Brickdale collection see: BRICKDALE
New Font: Alexandrine
I keep trying to come up with the perfect title font and while I’m not sure I’ll ever accomplish it, the process produces a lot of interesting fonts. The latest of these is Alexandrine. It was inspired to some degree by our recent Madding font, and also by the character forms in Illuminata. The idea was to take the general look of Illuminata, tone it down and make it less extreme and more usable for titles and even some text uses. In doing this I borrowed some ideas from Madding, but moved away from the Art Deco look of that font towards the cleaner look of Illuminata. The result works well. It’s attractive, readable and very modern.
You can download and try the demo version of Cascade in TrueType format for Mac or PC. The full version of the font is available if you want to BUY IT NOW.
Things to Do With Books, Besides Reading Them
There’s a fascinating article at OffbeatEarth about things people have done with books which are about as far as you can get from the intended purpose. Some of the uses are artistic, some are bizarre, but they all show remarkable creativity.
Looking at the huge library of books we’ve acquired in our research some of these alternate uses seem pretty tempting, though we’ll probably stick with digitizing the contents and making them useful to modern users, or at least get that job done before we start building fairy castles or using the books for furniture.
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New Font: BigBlok
A great many years ago when working in game publishing I had a real fascination with doing titles in a strong, super-bold font called Bolt Bold. The truth is I rather overused it. In doing some research I find it on more than a dozen different game books I wrote in the early 80s, all quite collectable and out of print today.
