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
Olive Allen’s Tanglewood Tales Illustrated
Our ongoing acquisition of cool little illustrated books has included a lot of small chapbooks of illustrated stories from various sources. We’ve featured some by Katherine Cameron and other artists of the early 20th century before as mini-packages or as inclusions in samplers. We’ve just processed and are making available a new set based on Olive Allen’s illustrations for an abridged edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales which features four of the most popular of the original stories, selected primarily for girls, including the stories of Europa, Persephone and Pandora.
The illustrations are done in a very attractive watercolor style with vivid colors and a soft, idealized look. The set includes seven original illustrations (two each from Pandora and Persephone) and a uniquely decorated front cover design with lettering in a style very similar to our Reynard font.
Olive Allen (Biller) was a little known, but very talented English/Canadian artist whose work has been archived in the special exhibits section at the rare books collection of the <a href=”http://www.library.ubc.ca/spcoll/displays/OliveAllenBiller/home.htm”>University of British Columbia</a> as the result of a family bequest. These illustrations are from her early career before she transitioned from illustration to mainly doing traditional watercolor paintings.
The mini-collection includes high resolution versions of all of the illustrations, plus a PDF ebook of the illustration set. You can buy it and download it for the nominal price of just $5 from our ONLINE STORE
In Development: Owen Jones’ Spanish Ballads
We’ve done several previous packages based on designs by Victorian design historian Owen Jones. They include our fantastic Grammar of Ornament package and the new Gray’s Elegy.
Our next addition to our selection of Jones design packages is a mammoth undertaking of all of the decorations, initials, emblems and borders in his early illustrated edition of J. G. Lockhart’s Ancient Spanish Ballads, a rare work which has an amazing selection of antique-style decorations with a Spanish or Moorish theme. Every section has its own unique border design and each chapter features unique decorative initials, section headers, fully illustrated pages and marginalia. It isn’t hand tinted or painted like some of Jones’ other books, but the sheer number of decorations is unbeatable.
Because of the characteristics of the printing and the higher acid content of the paper the images are requiring a lot of processing. Combine that with the large number of images and the preparation of the package is taking longer than is typical. We expect it to be ready sometime later in the summer, once we’ve had a chance to process and clean up all of the images. For now, here are a few samples to give you an idea of the content. You can click on any of them to see it in a somewhat larger size.
Walter Crane’s The Shepheard’s Calender
Another of Walter Crane’s interesting decorated books is his edition of Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Shepheard’s Calender. It’s not as well known as Spenser’s The Faerie Queen which Crane also illustrated, but it has excellent illustrations and a particularly outstanding set of emblems with latin mottos which accompany the main illustrations. It also has a great frontispiece, decorative endpapers and decorative embossed front and back covers.
As we’ve done with other Crane books like A Flower Wedding and Queen Summer we’ve scanned and digitally refined all of the images at high resolution. We’ve separated out the emblems as well as providing the full original illustrated pages, plus we’ve even made a custom font with letters based on the emblems. We’ve also put together a PDF preview of the book which you can TRY OUT to get an idea of the art in the collection.
All of this is collected together into a mini-package which is ready to use for your projects and designs. It’s available for immediate download from our ONLINE STORE for just $29 and it will eventually be included in our complete Walter Crane collection.
Walter Crane’s A Flower Wedding
We’re still working on digitizing our extensive collection of antique Walter Crane illustrated books. Our latest project is Crane’s 1905 work A Flower Wedding, an original poem illustrated with 39 decorative full-page plates. The concept of the work is that each of the wedding guests represents a flower and is depicted with that flower incorporated in the illustration. The illustrations are detailed and done in pastel colors in keeping with the floral motif. Unlike many of Crane’s other works which feature full, framed panels, the illustrations in A Flower Wedding are more delicate and stand alone, their edges fading into the background of the page.
The illustrations are lovely. The fanciful costuming of the characters and the little details which are included are particularly memorable. Stylistically they are most similar to Crane’s Queen Summer which we released recently. The lettering of the verses is in a style very similar to our Walter Crane font. We’ve collected all of the illustrations in high resolution format with the colors adjusted and defects edited out. The package includes all the illustrations individually, as well as a handy PDF format recreation of the original book for easy reference.
Owen Jones’ Illuminated Gray’s Elegy
homas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is probably one of the greatest poems in the English language and certainly of the 18th century. On its hundredth anniversary, legendary book designer and illustrator Owen Jones produced a special illuminated edition of the epic poem with detailed page borders, decorative initials and original lettering of the verses, which stands as one of the finest examples of his book design work.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimm’ring landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;
Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such, as wand’ring near her secret bow’r,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.
ur Gray’s Elegy design package preserves Jones’ book with all of the pages of text and decorations in digital form (as a PDF), as well as extracting all of the decorations, frames and initials so that they are ready to use for your design projects in high-resolution, full-color format. This has all been collected in a package which is now available for purchase and download. It can be ordered for just $49 from our ONLINE STORE and downloaded right away, or you can download and examine some of the contents in the free PDF PREVIEW featuring selected pages from the book.
2010 Font and Art Sampler
At the end of every year we put together a special discounted package with samples of what we produced during that year, and now it’s time to release a sampler with some of our best items from 2010, including selected art and featured fonts. 2010 saw the release of some extraordinary fonts and art and this is a chance to try out a great selection of those releases at a unbeatably low price.
The art in this demo collection includes the full set of illustrations from Charles Folkard’s edition of Ring of the Nibelungs, all of the illustrations from Walter Crane’s The Hind in the Woods and our collection of Texas Sky backgrounds. It also includes selected images from some of our new art packages, including Walter Crane’s Queen Summer, our collection of Jugend Tarot card art and Eleanor Brickdale’s Carols.
The package also includes the full release versions of four of our popular fonts form 2010: Antrobus, Bergling, Vambrace and Vyones. In aaddition it includes demo versions of all 18 of the new fonts released in 2010.
Best of all, the whole package is only $9.95 and you can order it online and download it FROM OUR STORE.
Eleanore Brickdale’s Carols for Christmas
Eleanore Fortescue Brickdale was a remarkable illustrator who was part of the generation of artists who came after the pre-Raphaelites and took many of their ideas and refined and commercialized them. Brickdale did a lot of illustration on religious themes and was particularly known for her cherubs, angels and images of children. Not surprisingly this meant that she worked on many holiday-related projects and one of the most impressive of those is her illustrated collection of classic Christmas carols.
Brickdale’s Carols is a brand new mini-package available just during the Christmas season. It is not yet in our complete Eleanor Brickdale package and is only available as a stand-alone item through the end of this year. It’s great source material for Christmas cards or decorations and includes large-size illustrations of traditional Christmas themes and also decorative scrolls and emblems which are easy to adapt to your designs.
Be warned that the art is beautiful, but also very traditional and very religious, so if you’re looking for something more generic or secular this probably isn’t the package for you. But if you need a quick fix of angels and cherubs and the baby Jesus, this is the package for you. It includes all of the illustrations and emblems from the book in high-resolution format, plus a large-size PDF ebook of the art. And best of all it’s just $12 for the whole thing and you can order and download it online from our store.
Walter Crane Christmas Bonus
As a special treat for customers working on holiday card designs, we’re making available a special mini-package of Christmas-themed images designed by Walter Crane at a tiny, almost minuscule price.
The images are based on Walter Crane’s illustrations for A Book of Christmas Verse by H. C. Beeching, which is a really excellent collection of historical Christmas music including some obscure hymns and carols which you may have forgotten about or never heard of. One of the Christmas carols is one I remember from my childhood which I haven’t heard or seen in years, an untitled carol credited to Bishop Heber which starts out:
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning!
Dawn on our darkeness, and lend us thine aid!
Star of the east, the horizon adorning,
Guide where our Infant Redeemer is laid!
Sure, it’s religious and therefore not for everyone, but the rhythm of the alliterative lyrics is really great poetry.
The mini-package will be included as a bonus item in our Walter Crane package when it eventually comes out, but for Christmas it’s available for purchase and download for just $5, The package includes 10 high-quality woodcut images in Crane’s unique style, perfect for making Christmas cards. You can order it online and download it immediately.
Walter Crane: The Hind in the Wood
As we continue development on our collection of material by Arts and Crafts master Walter Crane we get to share little tidbits of the contents before they are released. The latest example is a selection of art from the chapbook The Hind in the Wood, a smaller work than most of the Crane books we’ve been digitizing. The book is in a large format and basically consists of a single lavishly illustrated folktate, with four full-page illustrations, a two-page spread, endpapers and a cover. We’ve put it all together in a handy PDF you can download for review. The high resolution images will be in our Crane master package when it is relesed.
If you like Walter Crane’s art you should check out some of our Walter Crane resources like Pan Pipes, The Baby’s Opera, Queen Summer and The Baby’s Own Aesop. Plus we have two Walter Crane fonts available, Crane Gothic and Walter Crane.
The Jugend Tarot Deck
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I recently came upon a rare and unexpected discovery in one of my favorite rare book stores, a set of tarot-style playing cards issued as a bonus insert in the 1892 edition of the classic German Art Nouveau magazine Munchner Jugend.
The card set was designed by Julius Diez and features woodcut-style images with color highlights in red, green and gold. The style is reminiscent of 16th century woodcuts like the Dance of Death illustrations featured in one of the contemporary issues of the magazine. The images are certainly somewhat grotesque and intended to be comical, though to the modern viewer they appear rather disturbing, particularly the crippled Knight and Knave cards. There are also peculiarities, including numbers printed upside down, hand-stamped printers marks and various irregularities and quirks.
The card deck is adapted to playing trick-taking games with a customized deck based on the tarot deck, a popular trend of the 1890s. Although the card set resembles traditional tarot cards in many ways, it was likely not really intended for fortune telling. The complete deck consists of 36 cards in 3 9-card suits, including numbered cards 6 through 10 and four face cards, an Ace, a King, a Knight and a Knave. Each card contains unique imagery with small scenes on each of the numbered cards and larger individual figures on the face cards. The suits are variations of the standard suits, with bells (coins or diamonds), rods or clubs (wands), leaves or blades (spades or swords) and hearts. There is no trump suit as you would have in a true tarot deck.
This is somewhat of a novelty item and will ultimately be added to our Jugendstil Collection, but for now we’re also making the cleaned up and print ready version of the card set available for purchase in digital form for just $7. It’s a curiosity with some useful graphic elements. You can get it in our ONLINE STORE and download it immediately.
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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.
