The famous Irish poet and novelist Jonathan Swift (Dublin 1667-1745) has a large personal library of which he noticed carefully the book list by himself. We have used a facsimile from this catalogue to reconstruct this present font, as one example of the poet’s personal hands but also as a typical example of the British quill pen handwriting from about mid 1600’s to the beginning of 1700’s . It is a “Pro” font containing Western (including Celtic) and Northern European, Icelandic, Baltic, Eastern, Central European and Turquish diacritics. The numerous alternates and ligatures allow to made the font looking as closely as possible to the real hand. Using an OTF software, the features allow to vary automatically almost each character of a word without anything to do but to select contextual alternates and standard ligatures and/or stylistic alternates options.

Paradise Lost is a 1667 poem by John Milton which mostly concerns the Biblical story of the Fall of Man, Eve's temptation by the devil and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. It's quite a hefty read, as the poem consists of ten books with over 10.000 lines of verse. Needless to say, I didn't read it all. But, it did give me inspiration for a font, which I called Paradise Lost. It's a good name, even though there is nothing Biblical about this font. Paradise Lost was created (pun intended) using a broken bamboo satay skewer and Chinese ink. It is all caps, but upper and lower case differ and like to mingle. I also included several ligatures for double lower case letters (aa, ee, jj, kk, etc.). Paradise Lost comes with an eternity of diacritics.