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
Arts and Crafts Borders from the Calendar of Golden Thoughts of 1912
The Calendar of Golden Thoughts was published by Barse and Hopkins printing company in 1911. It was a calendar for the year 1912, but it also served as a sampler of their type, printers ornaments and borders. It had a page for every week and each page featured a different decorative border with an inspiring quote in decorative type with ornamental embellishments. It was an attractive example of craft printing of the period, hand assembled bound with tied string and sold packaged in an attractive display box.
The type and borders in the package are very much in the arts and crafts or early art deco style, similar in many respects to the types of designs favored by the Roycroft Arts and Crafts movement in New York in the early 1900s. The type featured in the calendar includes many different styles similar to some of the fonts we’ve done from that period like Valentin, Agravain and Albemarle. In addition to the great samples of early type and ornaments the calendar includes 40 unique borders, all of them created in a two-tone process using mortised cut brass plates. All of them are printed in red and black, but it’s remarkably easy to change the colors using the “select color range” tool in Adobe Photo shop. The style of the border designs is highly varied, from floral styles to some which look moorish to some which are mechanical aspect.
We’ve collected the images from the calendar together into a special package. It includes all 40 borders separated from the text, cleaned up and ready to use. It also includes all the original page images plus a PDF of the complete calendar. You can also download a PDF sampler of the calendar to view all the images.
The complete package can be purchased for $49 from our ONLINE STORE. And through the 10th of February you can get it for $10 off with the coupon code KALENDS.
Featured Font: Chaillot
| Chaillot is based on 12th century gothic calligraphy which has some characteristics of early black letter calligraphy and stylistic holdovers from late Carolingian lettering. It is a very bold and distinctive calligraphic style with unusual decorations and flourishes. Chaillot is one of our oldest fonts and was originally released in 1994. This updated version has additional characters and replaces the smallcaps in the original design with a customized true lowercase character set in the style of the capital letters of the original font. The demo version includes only the original uppercase and smallcaps. The new lowercase is only available in this new edition of the font.You can try the DEMO version of Chaillot for free. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24 online and download it right away. | 
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Flood Sale!
After months of drought here in Central Texas the rain decided to come to visit with a vengeance early Tuesday morning. We got 6 inches of rain in a little more than an hour, and because there had been so little rain for so long, none of the fall leaves around the legendary Scriptorium World Headquarters had washed away since the fall and Tuesday’s deluge washed them all down into the storm drains at once, clogging them up. With the drains clogged water backed up behind the building and rose up quickly, coming over the slab and flooding the ground floor several inches deep.
Fortunately the scope of the damage was fairly limited. All of the rare books are kept in the second-floor library and the rarest ones are in archival containers of one kind or another, safe from the damp. The archival folders containing our collection of Ivan Bilibin books from the early 1900s had been taken down for a project and were inches from the rising water, but they made it through okay. The most significant damage was to some electronic equipment. We lost a scanner, some phone equipment and two computer power adapters which were on the floor. So a little damage, but inconveniently under the yearly deductible for our insurance.
The flood was a pain in the neck, but not a full-scale disaster. It is, however, a great excuse for holding our first sale of the new year. If you place an order with a value of $60 or more during the next week, not only will you get a 25% discount on your total order, but you’ll also receive a free copy of the Cascade font (shown to the left) with your order – it seemed appropriate since it’s our most watery looking font. All you have to do is use the coupon code DELUGE when you check out.
Border and Ornament Fonts
            You can try out a sample border font for free. Click here to download the working trial version of Page Rules for either WINDOWS or MacOS |
One of the traditions in type design over the years has been the production of specialty type of printers ornaments, rules and borders to help offset and balance text on a page. When working with wood and metal type before the digital age, typesetters found these specialty fonts extremely useful. Sadly this is one area in which modern digital fontography has lagged behind. With this new collection of border, rule and ornament fonts we hope to address that sad shortcoming.
This package includes four entirely new fonts, plus some older fonts which fit the category. Many of the fonts form continuous borders or even complete frames, while others have ornaments or are designed to produce rules which delineate part of a page or divide sections. They include original designs, printers ornaments and rules from the 18th and 19th century, some nice Victorian period decorations, and our popular Celtic Borders font based on Celtic manuscript borders. Included among the new fonts are the Caswallon Ornaments font designed to go with our Caslon script font, plus a new 19th century rule font, an 18th century borders font and a Victorian border font. It’s quite a selection.
The Borders, Rules and Ornaments collection is available on CD or online for
just $59. You can call to purchase the package from our online ordering system. Just CLICK HERE
New Font: Langdon
| Langdon is our first new font of 2012. It’s based on samples of hand-rendered poster lettering from the early 1900s by J. M. Bergling. It has a strong, distinctive look with demi-serifs and an art nouveau or art deco look. It’s very much the kind of font which we might include in a new release of our Steampunk collection. It has some interesting features, including some alternative characters and a meticulously designed custom small-caps character set.
You can try the DEMO version of Langdon for free. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24 online and download it right away. |
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Historic Borders Collection
One of the latest additions to our phenomenal collection of images is a set of historic borders from the 15th through 19th centuries which exemplify the height of the art of decoration in printed books as it developed over that period. These are all borders which were cut in wood or metal to be set with type and they demonstrate the complexity and diversity of designs during this period in which printing matured and became more sophisticated.
All of the borders and decorative emblems in this special collection were taken from printed books and they have been cleaned up and adapted for use in digital design. They include designs from England and from continental Europe and from well known designers including Erhard Ratdolt, Will Ransom, Walter Teague, Walter Crane and William Morris. If you need borders with historical character you need look no further.
The entire collection is just $49 and can be ordered from our ONLINE STORE and downloaded immediately. You can click on any of the thumbnails below to see the corresponding border in larger size. The borders in the collection are considerably larger and all in very high resolution, suitable for high quality printing.
Classic Font: True Golden
| True Golden is one of the cornerstone fonts in our William Morris collection. It is a unique rendering of Morris’ Golden type, which he based on samples of early Jensen typefaces. Our rendering of the style has a special, authentic look because unlike most versions of the font which are based directly on the metal type, it is based on printed samples so it preserves some of the heavier weight and softer outlines which the font had when printed on the thick, high quality papers used by Morris for his Kelmscott Press books. It is the only version of Golden designed to preserve the look of the font as it was intended to be printed. True Golden is part of our Master Font series and includes an expanded character set plus custom bold and italic weights of the font.
You can try the DEMO version of True Golden for free. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $29 online and download it right away. |
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How Captain Kidd Was Designed
This article originally appeared on our site as a seven-part series of featured articles in 2004. It was recently recovered from an archive and is presented here as a complete article for the first time.
PART I
Sometimes when I’m working on new fonts I like to have a classic movie in the background. Recently one of the movies I watched was the great old film “Captain Kidd” starring Charles Laughton and Randolph Scott. While watching it with one eye and working with the other, I noticed that the film featured some very stylish piratically evocative title lettering – not to mention some lovely calligraphic maps. So I thought I’d take a stab at recreating the title lettering as a font and even document it in a series of articles showing how a font goes from an idea to final output.
The starting point for this font was a set of screen shots taken from the DVD of “Captain Kidd”. As is the case with a lot of old films the titles are extensive and show up right at the start of the film against a static backdrop. This makes them relatively accessible for screen shots, or in this case, higher resolution shots taken with a digital camera. It also means that a good selection of sample characters is available for reference. The example to the right is one of the best of these shots, because the lettering is particularly large. Many of the others are not as helpful because the print size is smaller, so some of the character details are harder to make out. However, using the best of the images as a starting point I can get enough bits and pieces to construct most of the other characters in high quality, using the lower quality images as a reference for the more unusual character shapes
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2011 Font and Art Sampler
At the end of every year we put together a special sampler package of releases from that year. This year our 2011 Font and Art Sampler has a particularly excellent collection selected from the many releases we’ve had during the year. It’s the best of the year in one compact package.
It starts with a special set of five fonts, including two of our regular new releases, Areobrush and Elsense plus three additional fonts which were only released in special packages and were not even available as demos, Guilford Crude, Ribbon Borders and Decobits. All five of these fonts are included in complete fully registered versions.
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The package also includes the demo versions of all 22 of the new fonts we released in 2011, from San Lorenzo to Nostromo . All of the demo fonts are in TrueType format for MacOS and Windows and the full fonts also include the files for PostScript users. It’s a remarkably varied assortment of original font designs.
The package also includes a selection of rare illustrations. It includes the complete sets of illustrations from Olive Allen’s Tanglewood Tales and Arthur Rackham’s Greek Heroes, which were released as mini-packages earlier in the year. It also includes an assorted collection of 24 high-resolution images from the hundreds included in the larger packages released during the year, including several Walter Crane and Owen Jones collections released in 2011.
Best of all, because this is a sampler package it’s available at the uniquely low promotional price of just $11.95 and you can order and download it online from our ONLINE STORE.
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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.
