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.
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
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.
New Holiday Clip-Art Mini Package
This year, as a special holiday offering we’re releasing a mini-package of seasonal clip-art with images based on mortised advertising cuts from the early 1900s. The images are based on printers oranments which would have originally been sold individually as brass plates to be inserted into a typeset page.
The seasonal images include lots of Santa images, trees, wreaths, bells, candles and all of the images associated with the holiday season, many of them in both monochrome and simple multi-color versions, with a charming vintage look. They are perfect for embellishing holiday cards or making labels for presents. Many even include open space in the design for addresses or names.
The package consists of 9 large-size pages of images, exactly as preserved in the printer’s type sample book from which they are drawn, published over 100 years ago. They are in high-resolution and should be printable with crisp output at fairly large sizes. The mini-package is only $10 and can be ordered online for immediate download from >OUR STORE in plenty of time for the holidays.
Holiday Fonts and Art
hatever holiday you celebrate, it’s probably a time of cards and presents and decorations and parties — that means you’re going to need great fonts and art to add elegance and unique flare to your seasonal projects. The Scriptorium Holiday Fonts and Art collection has the resources you need, including free samples and shareware demos, as well as a selection of holiday fonts and unique seasonal art which it took us years to collect.
e’ve recently combined our Holiday package into a single package and added a number of new fonts and images, all for a lower price than we were charging for our older packages. You get lots of holiday fonts and art to fit every taste, at a very reasonable price. In addition, we’ve got several shareware fonts for you to try out for a free evaluation, plus some great sample art. To try them out, see the bottom of this page.
he newest fonts added to our Holiday Fonts and Art collection include the Scurlock and Asrafel fonts plus the new Holiday Borders dingbat font which is featured as a free demo at the bottom of this page and also the extraordinary Rudolfo font package including Rudolfo Swash.
e’ve also added some new graphic material including some specialized borders, some color decorative initials (featured on this page) and a selection of new art, including pieces by several pre-raphaelite and renaissance period artists. These new images are pretty extraordinary.
Other images in the collection include all of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations for Dickens’ Christmas Carol and Howard Pyle’s illustrations from his story Travels of the Soul, plus art by Rackham, Rossetti, Nielsen, Dulac, Mucha, Wyeth and others. Only a small portion of the images are sampled on this page. Several bonus borders by Pyle are also included. Other recent additions to the collection include some seasonal Pre-Raphaelite images by Millais, Leyton and Hunt.
The new release of the collection now includes a total of 21 fonts, plus scores of great images and useful graphics. Fonts include everything from art fonts to decorative initials to elaborate text and titling styles.<
Like all of our font and art CDs, this package can be ordered online from our ORDERING site, or you can order by phone from 1-800-797-8973 (01-512-656-8011).
You’ll find a lot of these images and fonts in use on this site. This should give you some idea what you can do with them. In addition, to give you an even better idea of the unique quality of our fonts and graphics, we’ve got several demo items you can try out, including a demo version of our recently released Holiday Borders font, which is available exclusively on this CD. Just click on the appropriate button below each font sample to download a shareware demo version to try out.
For those of you doing your own Christmas design work, here’s a special pallette which you can open in Photoshop or other art programs and access with the sampling tool. It includes a variety of special colors which we think are particularly seasonal.
And finally, here’s a great Christmas themed page border with holly and candles and other good things. This graphic was found in an old issue of St. Nicholas children’s magazine from the early part of this century. Just click on the sample image to the right below to download the large size image.
As a special feature we’ve put together some ideas on how to design your own holiday cards. Just CLICK HERE for all the details.
You can order the complete package for download or delivery on CD for just $79 from our ONLINE STORE.
CELTIC CHRISTMAS?
One of the popular trends we’ve seen rcently s an interest in Celtic art and ornament as a theme for Christmas cards and decoration. We’ve got a special page devoted to Celtic fonts and art, which has some excellent resources if you want to give your holidays a Celtic look. Click here to visit our Celtic page: CELTIC FONTS & ART.
Art Nouveau Font Collection
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Our Art Nouveau collection is one of our most impressive font packages. It brings together all of our best fonts based on Art Nouveau period designs, an area in which we’ve specialized since our earliest releases. It’s an extensive collection, with over 30 unique fonts, including text, title faces and even decorative initials. Art Nouveau may be celebrating its 100th anniversary, but the style holds up remarkably well, and Art Nouveau fonts are both artistic and functional.
Many of these fonts originated in Art Nouveau period magazines like Munchner Jugend, The Studio and Yellow Book or in period advertising, poster or sign designs. The collection includes some of the most recognizable styles of the period (Ariosto, Munich, Pantagruel) as well as unique faces based on rare hand lettering (Walhal, Beauvoir, Phaeton).
The Art Nouveau collection has recently been expanded with the addition of new fonts like Boetia, Belgravia and Jugendstil Kunsthand, plus 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.
This recently updated edition of the Art Nouveau collection is normally $99 but it is currently available at a special price of only $89. It comes with both TrueType and Postscript fonts for either the MacOS or Windows. You can order it by calling 1-800-797-8973 or just CLICK HERE to order it online and get it delivered by email or on CD.
We also offer a special Art Nouveau super-package which includes our Art Nouveau fonts collection, our Jugendstil (click for details) font and art collection and our Alphons Mucha (click for details) collections, to cover the full range of Art Nouveau type, art and design. Purchased individually these would have a total value of $187, but you can get the combination package on CD for only $139. Just CLICK HERE
To get a feel for how Art Nouveau fonts look, here’s a trial version of Norumbega for you to play around with. You may recognize this font because it has been prominently featured in the cover designs for a series of books by the author Mercedes Lackey. The full version of Norumbega is in the package, but this version has the basic character set for you to play around with. Just click on the image below to download the demo.
Illuminated Initials from Early Manuscripts
In the mid-19th century Owen Jones undertook to catalog historic design and decoration in phenomenal detail and with exacting thoroughness in a series of beautifully illustrated books. The most famous of these is his Grammar of Ornament, which provides an overview of design and ornament from ancient times to the Renaissance. His next most notable work on historic design is his collection of Illuminated Initials from Early Manuscripts, a magnificent work on historic calligraphy and illumination which we are now making available in digital form, prepared with the same kind of care and attention to detail as our digital edition of the Grammar of Ornament.
The collection consists of all the original illustrations in the Jones book, including hundreds of initials and decorative calligraphic letters. It includes a large selection of ornate initials from different historic periods, plus several complete historic calligraphic alphabets and a selection of decorative borders and embellishments. The designs are extraordinarily detailed with brilliant colors and include examples of illumination from the early medieval period through the gothic period of the high middle ages, including outstanding Celtic, Gothic and Frankish styles.
You can see some samples of individual initials of several different styles here, or click on the sample page to the right to download a PDF with reduced-size versions of all the pages from the original book. The PDF can give you a good idea of the content of the collection, but not the quality of the images in the full package, which are in high resolution and large size with vivid colors and painstaking digital clean-up and color adjustment. These are great examples of the highly detailed, full-color initials which look great, but just can’t normally be turned into fonts. With a few exceptions, as the package also includes a bonus – two original fonts based on alphabets from the collection, Alcuin and Leodegar.
The complete Illuminated Initials from Early Manuscripts collection is available for purchase online and can be downloaded or delivered on CD for just $69 from our ONLINE STORE.
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. You can also order it in a discounted combo package with the Colonial Fonts for just $129 and save $20.
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.
Renaissance Fonts and Art Collection
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The Renaissance saw the movement of literature into vernacular languages, the beginnings of printing and mass book production and the popularization of fiction and writing of all sorts aimed at a wider, commercial audience. In accord with the humanist philosophy of the Renaissance there was a demand for more practical, accessible forms of lettering and a trend away from the artificiality of gothic and medieval styles. As with so many things, Renaissance scribes and artists found inspiration by throwing out the past millenium of history and going farther back, looking to the lettering styles of Rome for inspiration.
Rediscovered Roman lettering styles were adapted to fit the practical needs of Italian businessmen and record keepers and ultimately improved on to meet the sophisticated needs of Renaissance writers like Dante, Machiavelli and Boccacio. This produced the lettering styles which we traditionally associate with the Renaissance. They needed writing which was easy to reproduce in larger volume than ever before, but readable to a broad audience. Letter forms had to be attractive, but simpler and less exacting, requiring fewer strokes, permitting a flowing hand, and abandonning elaborate decoration and dramatic variations in weight and thickness. The lettering styles of the Renaissance had a huge influence on early type designers and established design principles and basic letter forms which live on in modern type designs.
Our Renaissance font collection includes 10 unique fonts based on designs from the Renaissance. These include three variations of humanistic cursive (Palmieri, Castiglione and Hanes), plus two more unusual examples of quirky italian cursives (Fiorenza and the new Alleghieri), a unique Roman style hand-lettered font (Rudolfo and Rudolfo Swash), a fully-developed example of Trajan-style Roman lettering, the basis for most formal Renaissance lettering (Hadrianus), plus a classic flouished cursive (Trinculo) and a set of floral intials from the Quattrocento (Fraticelli). There’s a little bit of everything from the period, from early period cursive like Palmieri to more practical late Renaissance lettering like Fiorenza.
The package also includes a selection of frames, borders, initials and emblems designed by Evelyn Paul based on Renaissance period book decorations. These include illuminations and decorations in both color and black and white, as well as a few selected full-page decorative plates. In combination with the varied selection of fonts they provide just what you need to give any document a full-fledged Renaissance look.
The Renaissance Fonts & Art package is a great deal with all of the fonts and art for only $79. It comes for either Windows or MacOS computers and includes both Postscript and TrueType fonts. You can order by phone at 1-800-797-8973 (01-512-276-7352), or to order online just CLICK HERE
To get an idea of what our Renaissance fonts are like, try out the demo version of our latest one, Alleghieri. It doesn’t have all of the punctuation and variant characters, but should give you a good feel for the font.
Alleghieri was developed from several different examples of late Renaissance lettering. While it is based on a style which is clearly intended for quick, easy writing, we’ve preserved many of the unusual character forms and elaborations to give it a lot of personality. The result is stylish and unique, with a real feel of the Renaissance, but great readability as well. The full version includes a large selection of variant character forms and special characters.
Click here to download the working trial version of Alleghieri for either WINDOWS or MacOS Or you can purchase this font online and get it quickly by email, including all the alternate and additional characters – BUY IT NOW
Special Arthur Rackham Mini Package
We’ve been doing an awful lot with Walter Crane recently, but sort of neglecting one of his great contemporaries who has been a mainstay of our collection in the past, Arthur Rackham. Rackham was arguably the greatest illustrator of his era and certainly one of the highest paid. He is also certainly the best remembered and most widely imitated today. Popular current artists like Brian Froud and Charles Vess owe him a great deal and acknowledge his role in laying the groundwork for the modern tradition of fantasy and folklore illustration.
Our Rackham Fonts and Art Collection is great, but it is still far from complete considering how prolific he was. So we’re slowly incorporating more material. One unusual and extremely rare item has just been processed and is now available, a collection of color and black and white illustrations from the 1910 edition of Rackham’s illustration of Greek myths titled Greek Heroes. This is a unique and special work because Rackham worked outside of his typical illustration style and the color pieces in particular look very different from what we’re used to from Rackham – much more realistic and less stylized. The black and white pieces are more typical of his other work. Themes covered include the labors of Hercules, the tale of Jason and the Argonauts and the story of Perseus.
It’s also a relatively small set of high quality illustrations – what would be considered a minor work when compared to some of his other massive and elaborate projects like his illustrations for Wagner’s Ring Saga. But however minor it is, it’s also very rare and the illustrations are almost never seen elsewhere and they are also powerful and visually striking, with an unusual color palette of browns and reds which Rackham used relatively infrequently.
The set of 12 high resolution illustrations from Greek Heroes (4 color, 8 black and white) has already been added to our Rackham Fonts and Art Collection, so if you order that package now it will be included. Alternatively you can also purchase the mini-collection separately for just $8 and you can order it and download it directly 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.
