Clara Peck Lettering in The Prince of Mercuria

I recently picked up a copy of the novel The Prince of Mercuria by Atkinson Kimball with illustrations by Clara Elsene Peck.  When I saw it online I figured I had to have it to add to my collection of Peck-illustrated books, particularly because it has a particularly good set of samples of her calligraphy.

The novel is a reasonably good Graustark/Zenda type novel of the early 1900s, which I suspect was origianlly serialized in <i>Harper’s Bazaar</i> or one of the other Hearst magazines.  This version is its first appearance in complete novel format and it suffers somewhat from the transition.  The great calligraphy, like that featured on the entirely handlettered frontispiece to the right, suffers considerably because of the inferior quality of the paper on which the book is printed.  You can see from the detail of the words “New York” (below) how the rough fibers and porosity of the cheap paper have caused the ink to break up and spread, producing a relatively poor representation of the original lettering.

In developing another font from these samples for our inevitable Peck collection to go with Peck Initials, Elsene and Peck Shields, I will kind of have to reverse engineer the characters, making them less blurred and broken and recreating their ideal forms.  There won’t be any simple importing and tracing with this sort of source material, unless I can find a copy of the serialized version which was almost certainly printed on much better paper.

Anyway, this will be one of the projects we have in the works in the next few months. The Prince of Mercuria also has some nice marginalia and borders which might end up in a font or at least be included in an eventual Peck package as graphics.

Rating 4.00 out of 5

New Font: Elsene

Elsene is a new font based on lettering by early 20th century illustrator Clara Elsene Peck, obviously taking its name from her middle name. It’s based on her lettering and initials from the book Knocks Witty and Wise. A companion set of illustrations will be available soon. With Elsene you really get several fonts in one, because it includes multiple variant character sets, a complete set of outline characters and a selection of character frames and highlights. It’s based on the artist’s lettering, so it has all the quirks and peculiarities you’d expect, plus a heavy weight which is excellent for titles. It works well in combination with our two other Peck fonts, Peck Initials and Peck Shields.

You can try the DEMO version of Elsene for free with a limited character set. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $29 online and download it right away.

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Rating 4.00 out of 5

Clara Peck Project

Clara Elsene Peck was a little known but very talented book illustrator of the early 1900s. Her books are hard to find, but worth the effort because her style is unique and peculiar and includes a very appealing combination of illustration, decoration and hand lettering.

We’ve collected several books designed by Peck, but the only item we’ve released to date based on her designs is a single font called Peck Initials based on decorative initials which she did for the book Shakespeare’s Sweetheart. Now we’re working on our next Peck project, which is a collection of pen and ink illustrations and decorations from her childrens’ book Knocks Witty and Wise. The package will also include a new font based on Peck’s lettering which is yet to be named, but you can see some samples of the uniquely styled characters below.

Rating 3.00 out of 5


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