The famous roman type cut in Venice by Nicolas Jenson, and used in 1470 for his printing of the tract, De Evangelica Praeparatione, Eusebius, has usually been declared the seminal and definitive representative of a class of types known as Venetian Old Style. The Jenson type is thought to have been the primary model for types that immediately followed. Subsequent 15th-century Venetian Old Style types, cut by other punchcutters in Venice and elsewhere in Italy, are also worthy of study, but have been largely neglected by 20th-century type designers. There were many versions of Venetian Old Style types produced in the final quarter of the quattrocento. The exact number is unknown, but numerous printed examples survive, though the actual types, matrices, and punches are long gone. All these types are not, however, conspicuously Jensonian in character. Each shows a liberal amount of individuality, inconsistency, and eccentricity. My fascination with these historical types began in the 1970s and eventually led to the production of my first text typeface, Iowan Old Style (Bitstream, 1991). Sometime in the early 1990s, I started doodling letters for another Venetian typeface. The letters were pieced together from sections of circles and squares. The n, a standard lowercase control character in a text typeface, came first. Its most unusual feature was its head serif, a bisected quadrant of a circle. My aim was to see if its sharp beak would work with blunt, rectangular, foot serifs. Next, I wanted to see if I could construct a set of capital letters by following a similar design system. Rectangular serifs, or what we today call "slab serifs," were common in early roman printing types, particularly text types cut in Italy before 1500. Slab serifs are evident on both lowercase and uppercase characters in roman types of the Incunabula period, but they are seen mainly at the feet of the lowercase letters. The head serifs on lowercase letters of early roman types were usually angled. They were not arched, like mine. Oddly, there seems to be no actual historical precedent for my approach. Another characteristic of my arched serif is that the side opposite the arch is flat, not concave. Arched, concave serifs were used extensively in early italic types, a genre which first appeared more than a quarter century after roman types. Their forms followed humanistic cursive writing, common in Italy since before movable type was used there. Initially, italic characters were all lowercase, set with upright capitals (a practice I much admire and would like to see revived). Sloped italic capitals were not introduced until the middle of the sixteenth century, and they have very little to do with the evolution of humanist scripts. In contrast to the cursive writing on which italic types were based, formal book hands used by humanist scholars to transcribe classical texts served as a source of inspiration for the lowercase letters of the first roman types cut in Italy. While book hands were not as informal as cursive scripts, they still had features which could be said to be more calligraphic than geometric in detail. Over time, though, the copied vestiges of calligraphy virtually disappeared from roman fonts, and type became more rational. This profound change in the way type developed was also due in part to popular interest in the classical inscriptions of Roman antiquity. Imperial Roman letters, or majuscules, became models for the capital letters in nearly all early roman printing types. So it was, that the first letters in my typeface arose from pondering how shapes of lowercase letters and capital letters relate to one another in terms of classical ideals and geometric proportions, two pinnacles in a range of artistic notions which emerged during the Italian Renaissance. Indeed, such ideas are interesting to explore, but in the field of type design they often lead to dead ends. It is generally acknowledged, for instance, that pure geometry, as a strict approach to type design, has limitations. No roman alphabet, based solely on the circle and square, has ever been ideal for continuous reading. This much, I knew from the start. In the course of developing my typeface for text, innumerable compromises were made. Even though the finished letterforms retain a measure of geometric structure, they were modified again and again to improve their performance en masse. Each modification caused further deviation from my original scheme, and gave every font a slightly different direction. In the lower case letters especially, I made countless variations, and diverged significantly from my original plan. For example, not all the arcs remained radial, and they were designed to vary from font to font. Such variety added to the individuality of each style. The counters of many letters are described by intersecting arcs or angled facets, and the bowls are not round. In the capitals, angular bracketing was used practically everywhere stems and serifs meet, accentuating the terseness of the characters. As a result of all my tinkering, the entire family took on a kind of rich, familiar, coarseness - akin to roman types of the late 1400s. In his book, Printing Types D. B. Updike wrote: "Almost all Italian roman fonts in the last half of the fifteenth century had an air of "security" and generous ease extremely agreeable to the eye. Indeed, there is nothing better than fine Italian roman type in the whole history of typography." It does seem a shame that only in the 20th century have revivals of these beautiful types found acceptance in the English language. For four centuries (circa 1500 - circa 1900) Venetian Old Style faces were definitely not in favor in any living language. Recently, though, reinterpretations of early Italian printing types have been returning with a vengeance. The name Vendetta, which as an Italian sound I like, struck me as being a word that could be taken to signifiy a comeback of types designed in the Venetian style. In closing, I should add that a large measure of Vendetta's overall character comes from a synthesis of ideas, old and new. Hallmarks of roman type design from the Incunabula period are blended with contemporary concerns for the optimal display of letterforms on computer screens. Vendetta is thus not a historical revival. It is instead an indirect but personal digital homage to the roman types of punchcutters whose work was influenced by the example Jenson set in 1470. John Downer.

Bold, rounded and super cool. Those are the attributes of my latest font “Vinyle”, french for vinyl. In this epoque where all fields of Design are giving a lot of importance and attention to Typography and Lettering, I felt it was my duty to contribute with something that could really stand alone and ‘say something else’ that just words to be read. I've found that lately in the world, regarding a finished piece of design, the role of Typography (and of letters in general) went from being secondary, (like a minor player or a supporting actor) to the most important one. People are starting to understand the beauty of a well-done letter: they want their storefronts with unique scripts, they want to drink coffee surrounded by lettered blackboards, they want to buy books with astonishing covers with swashes ‘por doquier’. I'm more than happy to be alive in a present where even the most unimaginable friends of mine, (who couldn't spot differences between comic sans and helvetica before) are now conscious of the importance of a letter, or let’s say: Of the ‘voice’ of Typography. With Vinyle I tried to make a font with power. Following the nowadays trend of, let me say, “the vintage sans renaissance”. This time I put my brushes and nibs aside and experimented with something new. It wasn't easy, if you will pardon, for me to see swashes all over the place withouth the classic calligraphic ‘thick and thins’, but with after some weeks of work I started to love them. Like I already showed you in other creations (1) let me finish with the phrase: GEOMETRY IS SEXY! TIPS Vinyle has a lot of attitude, it shouts “here I am!” it really can ‘design an entire piece’ for you with just a word or two: It was designed with a 10 degree slant on purpose so the user may rotate it (like on the posters) that amount of degrees in order to see better results. Use Vinyle with the ‘fi’ standard ligatures activates for better kerning and ligatures! NOTES (1) See my font Selfie , the ‘little sister’ of Vinyle.

Arabetics Symphony is a Sans Serif Latin typeface with a comprehensive support for the Arabetic scripts, including Quranic texts. It is designed with a uniform glyph thickness and weight throughout, using a combination of simplified and clear open lines and curves and plenty of spikes and visual hints to compensate for the missing Latin serifs or traditional cursive Arabic calligraphic influence. This type family is suitable for both text and display applications. Additional Latin spacing is added to match an overall open-looking Arabic and is further maintained by a careful implementation of a typical Latin font kerning process. The design of this font family, including metrics and dimensions, was intended to make its Latin harmonize with other Arabetics foundry fonts. Arabetics Symphony fully supports MS 1252 Western and 1256 Arabic code pages, in addition to all the transliteration characters required by the ALA-LC Romanization tables. Users can either select an accented character directly or form it by keying the desired combining diacritic mark following an unaccented character. For Arabic, it fully supports Unicode 6.1, and the latest Arabic Supplement and Extended-A Unicode blocks. The Arabic design of this font family follows the Mutamathil Taqlidi design style with connected glyphs, emphasizing vertical strokes to bring added harmony, and utilizing slightly varying x-heights to match that found in Latin. The Mutamathil Taqlidi type style uses one glyph for every basic Arabic Unicode character or letter, as defined by the Unicode Standards, and one additional final form glyph, for each freely-connecting letter of the Arabic cursive text. Arabetics Symphony includes the required Lam-Alif ligatures in addition to all vowel diacritic ligatures. Soft-vowel diacritic marks (harakat) are selectively positioned with most of them appearing on similar high and low levels—top left corner—, to clearly distinguish them from the letters. Tatweel is a zero-width glyph. Keying the “tatweel” key (shft-j) before Alif-Lam-Lam-Ha will display the Allah ligature. Arabetics Symphony includes both Arabic and Arabic-Indic numerals, in addition to generous number of punctuation and mathematical symbols. Available in both OpenType and TrueType formats, it includes two weights, regular and bold, each has normal, Italic, and left-slanted styles.

Rabenau (formerly Lucinde), the distinctly warm and legible type family For 30 years the graphic designer Axel Bertram worked at creating his typefaces: He developed complete new alphabets for magazines and typewriters as well as for the constant demand for typefaces for use by commercial artists. He has developed wall charts the size of advertising posters as teaching aids for training commercial and graphic artists to write in a clean, classic cursive script. In the eighties he used the American Chyron computer to design a screen font for television. In the mid-nineties he discovered for himself the fabulous possibilities offered by the Fontographer font software program and explored them playfully. From the results of these experiments, Axel Bertram selected a design for further development. From 2003 onwards the calligrapher and type designer Andreas Frohloff collaborated with him on the further development and production of the 16 fonts of the Rabenau™ typeface family.The Rabenau font was inspired by many factors: From the fonts used as book covers to typewriter fonts and even printed material from England dating from the beginning of the nineteenth century (e.g. those used by the skilled printer William Bulmer), Rabenau's relatively high contrast is offset by some organic tapers, subtley rounded bracketed serifs, and a fairly generous x-height. This makes for a typeface that looks especially good in print. Its broad repertoire of weights and styles - Condensed, Poster, and Shadow - give it added versatility, and make it ideal for setting both display and text in the same typeface. Throughout the heavier weights, the contrast is maintained. The Poster Italic sparkles, and will make a fine display type for dynamic headlines, or logotypes. This family of sixteen fonts works beautifully together. All Rabenau font styles have a large set of ligatures and thus cover typical letter combinations in many European languages. Besides the standard ligatures for ff, fi and fl, letter connections are also available for tt, th and fj or ffi, ffl and ffk. The range is completed with lovely arched transitions for the characters st, ck or ct. The latter gives the font that certain something, both in continuous text and above all in headlines.

TT Hazelnuts useful links: Specimen PDF | Graphic presentation | Customization options About TT Hazelnuts: TT Hazelnuts is a display sans-serif font family containing a set of elegant and delicate decorative elements. Initially the family was designed for highly specialized areas, but we've decided to extend the number of typefaces and to make the family more universal. Despite its geometric essence, TT Hazelnuts reflects a touch of human hand—you can take a calligraphic tool and, by turning it, draw pretty much the whole font. TT Hazelnuts font family is perfect for small text arrays, for instance, for fashion or advertising industries, and will also fit perfectly into layout of longer and more complex typographic systems thanks to a large variety of font weights (Thin, ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, ExtraBold, Black, Heavy) and its true italics. It has already become a good tradition to include broad support of OT features into our new fonts. TT Hazelnuts is not an exception, it uses a large number of useful features: ordn, sinf, sups, numr, dnom, tnum, onum, frac, case. FOLLOW US: Instagram | Facebook | Website TT Hazelnuts language support: Acehnese, Afar, Albanian, Alsatian, Aragonese, Arumanian, Asu, Aymara, Banjar, Basque, Belarusian (cyr), Bemba, Bena, Betawi, Bislama, Boholano, Bosnian (cyr), Bosnian (lat), Breton, Bulgarian (cyr), Cebuano, Chamorro, Chiga, Colognian, Cornish, Corsican, Cree, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Embu, English, Erzya, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Friulian, Gaelic, Gagauz (lat), Galician, German, Gusii, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiri Motu, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Innu-aimun, Interlingua, Irish, Italian, Javanese, Judaeo-Spanish, Judaeo-Spanish, Kalenjin, Karachay-Balkar (lat), Karaim (lat), Karakalpak (lat), Kashubian, Khasi, Khvarshi, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kongo, Kumyk, Kurdish (lat), Ladin, Latvian, Laz, Leonese, Lithuanian, Luganda, Luo, Luxembourgish, Luyia, Macedonian, Machame, Makhuwa-Meetto, Makonde, Malay, Manx, Maori, Mauritian Creole, Minangkabau, Moldavian (lat), Montenegrin (lat), Mordvin-moksha, Morisyen, Nahuatl, Nauruan, Ndebele, Nias, Nogai, Norwegian, Nyankole, Occitan, Oromo, Palauan, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rheto-Romance, Rohingya, Romanian, Romansh, Rombo, Rundi, Russian, Rusyn, Rwa, Salar, Samburu, Samoan, Sango, Sangu, Scots, Sena, Serbian (cyr), Serbian (lat), Seychellois Creole, Shambala, Shona, Slovak, Slovenian, Soga, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Sundanese, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Swiss German, Swiss German, Tagalog, Tahitian, Taita, Tatar, Tetum, Tok Pisin, Tongan, Tsonga, Tswana, Turkish, Turkmen (lat), Ukrainian, Uyghur, Vepsian, Volapük, Võro, Vunjo, Xhosa, Zaza, Zulu.

Morris Fuller Benton, the principal designer of the American Type Founders, designed Mariage in 1901. Mariage, which has been sold under a plethora of different names during the last century, is a blackletter typeface belonging to the Old English category. The term blackletter refers to typefaces that stem out of the historical printing traditions of northern Europe. These letters, called gebrochene Schriften, or "broken type" in German, are normally elaborately bent and distorted. Their forms often print large amounts of ink upon the page, creating text that leaves a heavy, black impression. The Old English style is a subset of blackletter type that dates back to 1498, when Wynken de Worde introduced textura style printing to England. Continental printers had been printing with textura style letters since Gutenberg's invention of the printing press fifty years earlier. Italian printers stopped using them around 1470. For northern Europeans, texturas remained the most popular form of typeface design until the invention of the fraktur style in Nuremberg. Mariage is heavily classicized sort of Old English type. During the Victorian era, designers admired the Middle Ages for its chivalric, community-based values and its pre-industrial lifestyle. Yet they also found the basic medieval textura letterform too difficult to read by present standards. They desired to modernize this old style. Today, this sort of update is often referred to not as "modernization" but as classicism. Benton's design for ATF builds upon earlier Victorian classicist interpretations of Old English/textura letters. For an example of what these Victorian designs looked like, check out the popular 1990 revival of the genre, Old English . Old English style types often appear drastically different from other blackletters. For contrast, compare Mariage to a classical German fraktur design, Fette Fraktur , a schwabacher style face, or the popular early 20th Century calligraphic gothic from Linotype, Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch . Especially in the United States, classicist Old English typefaces are thought to espouse tradition and journalistic integrity. These features, together with the inherent, complex beauty of Mariage's forms, make this typeface a perfect choice for certificates, awards, and newsletter mastheads.

Grappa, a traditional Italian spirit with a rich history, shares much in common with typefaces - both embody cultural heritage, craftsmanship, and a sensory experience. Grappa is distilled from the skins, pulp, seeds, and stems left over from winemaking, resulting in a strong and aromatic drink that varies in flavor based on the grape and distillation process. Similarly, typefaces are designed characters that convey a unique style, weight, and form, communicating messages and expressing ideas through text. We are thrilled to introduce Grappa, a stunning new font based on the classic "Invitation" typeface by Morris Fuller Benton, a renowned American designer. Grappa features nine weights and a variable font that offers greater customization, with unique triangle serifs that give it a distinct edge. The font also comes with a variety of alternates and swash characters, including a second version with modified alternate characters for even more design flexibility. Like Grappa, typefaces evoke emotions and cultural associations, often associated with specific historical periods, artistic movements, and contexts. Whether used in stationery, packaging, editorial design, or branding, Grappa is a versatile and timeless font that can add elegance and sophistication to any project. In conclusion, Grappa is an excellent addition to any designer's toolkit, offering a perfect blend of tradition and modernity. The font's distinctive personality and cultural connotations make it a beloved drink in Italy, and a font that can effectively communicate messages and ideas through text.

Aeonian, designed by Emilia Adorno, was mostly inspired by the iconic morphology adopted by the arts of the 1920s. One hundred years later we can still see the resemblance between the wants and the needs of now and then to reach for the sky, to look ahead and enter the future in style. Now as then, we seek the right tools to do so, then once again, we embrace the rational, yet elegant and stylish forms of simplicity, geometry and symmetry. At the same time, there is a strong and growing need for a warmer approach to creating lovemarks. For that, Aeonian’s alternates hold attractive, soft and inviting shapes to an emotional appeal. Aeonian is a combination of all of them. A rational side entwined with an emotional one. Born a geometric sans, Aeonian ended up being a 2 in 1 font with a sans serif set and alternates reaching over 1200 glyphs. The entire family contains 6 weights, from thin to black, with its matching italics. It features a variety of ligatures to be used as connectors, specially for display. It also offers multilingual support, even for certain display ligatures. Later, Aeonian kept growing, with stylistic alternate sets of initial, mid and final glyphs. These are its arms to reach for infinity with a warm heart. The wide range of possibilities that Aeonian offers, makes it the best font for creating vast design systems with a rich visual language.

Presenting Dena Font, a forward-thinking typeface that straddles the boundaries of future aesthetics and modern design. Designed for the cutting edge designer, Dena Font is more than simply a letterform—it's a design language, a representation of sophisticated elegance influenced by cyberculture, sci-fi movies, and innovative video games. Dena Font is a tool that gives designers the ability to push the frontiers of creativity and reshape the visual world. Elevate your projects with Dena Font's futuristic appeal, which combines typography with creativity. Every letterform in Dena Font has a vibrant, futuristic feel to it. The deftly drawn characters blend together to create a visual rhythm that mirrors the quick-paced, constantly-changing nature of contemporary design. Modern Futuristic style: With futuristic style, Dena Font is at the vanguard of modern design. It is the perfect option for forward-thinking design projects because every curve and shape is painstakingly created to communicate a sense of innovation and advancement. Ligature-Enhanced Creativity: Dena Font's rich ligature set enables designers to smoothly combine characters to create a flowing and melodic typographic expression. These artistically elegant ligatures provide a touch of refinement to your designs and are ideal for creating distinctive logo types and brand identities. Overcoming linguistic obstacles, Dena Font provides extensive assistance for the Latin Western Europe character set. This makes your creative vision a flexible instrument for international design projects by guaranteeing successful communication across linguistic environments.

The Typorium presents a new optimized and enriched version of ITC Ellipse which first appeared in 1996 in the International Typeface Corporation typeface library. ITC Ellipse Script is a complementary typeface to ITC Ellipse Neo, designed a very legible handwriting style. ITC Ellipse Script is both modern and classic. Modern in the unusual shape based on the geometric ellipse form. And classic in the structure of some letters like the lower cases c, e, g, o, s. These letters alone could come from a traditional typeface, but they fit perfectly with the atypical rest of the alphabet giving it a present-day and traditional mix. Furthermore, the ellipse shape fits naturally in the italic styles, giving the font an organic and fluid feeling. ITC Ellipse Script offers OpenType features such as alternate characters for upper and lower case, and an extended accented character set to support many languages. Five weights have been created for each style to offer a wide range of graphic possibilities in a tidy digital footprint. Designer: Jean-Renaud Cuaz Publisher: Typorium MyFonts debut: Nov 1, 2020 Le Typorium présente une nouvelle version optimisée et enrichie d'ITC Ellipse qui est apparue pour la première fois en 1996 dans la bibliothèque de caractères de l'International Typeface Corporation. ITC Ellipse Script est une police complémentaire à ITC Ellipse Neo, conçue dans un style d'écriture très lisible. ITC Ellipse Script est à la fois moderne et classique. Moderne dans le dessin inhabituel basé sur la forme géométrique de l’ellipse. Et classique dans la structure de certaines lettres comme les minuscules c, e, g, o, s. Ces lettres pourraient provenir d'une police de caractères traditionnelle, mais elles s'intègrent parfaitement avec le reste de l'alphabet plus insolite en lui donnant un mélange de modernité et de tradition. De plus, la forme de l'ellipse s'intègre naturellement dans les styles italiques, donnant à la police une sensation organique et fluide. ITC Ellipse Script offre des fonctionnalités OpenType telles que des caractères alternatifs pour les capitales et les bas de casse, et un jeu de caractères accentués étendu pour prendre en charge de nombreuses langues. Cinq graisses ont été créés pour chaque style afin d'offrir un large éventail de possibilités graphiques pour une empreinte numérique rigoureuse.

In 1955 the Czech State Department of Culture, which was then in charge of all the publishing houses, organised a competition amongst printing houses and generally all book businesses for the design of a newspaper typeface. The motivation for this contest was obvious: the situation in the printing presses was appalling, with very little quality fonts existing and financial resources being too scarce to permit the purchase of type abroad. The conditions to be met by the typeface were strictly defined, and far more constrained than the ones applied to regular typefaces designed for books. A number of parameters needed to be considered, including the pressure of the printing presses and the quality of the thin newspaper ink that would have smothered any delicate strokes. Rough drafts of type designs for the competition were submitted by Vratislav Hejzl, Stanislav Marso, Frantisek Novak, Frantisek Panek, Jiri Petr, Jindrich Posekany, and the team of Stanislav Duda, Karel Misek and Josef Tyfa. The committee published its comments and corrections of the designs, and asked the designers to draw the final drafts. The winner was unambiguous — the members of the committee unanimously agreed to award Stanislav Marso’s design the first prize. His typeface was cast by Grafotechna (a state-owned enterprise) for setting with line-composing machines and also in larger sizes for hand-setting. Regular, bold, and bold condensed cuts were produced, and the face was named Public. In 2003 we decided to digitise the typeface. Drawings of the regular and italic cuts at the size of approximatively 3,5 cicero (43 pt) were used as templates for scanning. Those originals covered the complete set of caps except for the U, the lowercase, numerals, and sloped ampersand. The bold and condensed bold cuts were found in an original specimen book of the Rude Pravo newspaper printing press. These specimens included a dot, acute, colon, semicolon, hyphens, exclamation and question marks, asterisk, parentheses, square brackets, cross, section sign, and ampersand. After the regular cut was drafted, we began to modify it. All the uppercase letters were fine-tuned, the crossbar of the A was raised, E, F, and H were narrowed, L and R were significantly broadened, and the angle of the leg and arm of the K were adjusted. The vertex of the M now rests on the baseline, making the glyph broader. The apex of the N is narrower, resulting in a more regular glyph. The tail of Q was made more decorative; the uppercase S lost its implied serifs. The lowercase ascenders and descenders were slightly extended. Corrections on the lower case a were more significant, its waist being lowered in order to improve its colour and light. The top of the f was redrawn, the loop of lowercase g now has a squarer character. The diagonals of the lowercase k were harmonised with the uppercase K. The t has a more open and longer terminal, and the tail of the y matches its overall construction. Numerals are generally better proportioned. Italics have been thoroughly redrawn, and in general their slope is lessened by approximatively 2–3 degrees. The italic upper case is more consistent with the regular cut. Unlike the original, the tail of the K is not curved, and the Z is not calligraphic. The italic lower case is even further removed from the original. This concerns specifically the bottom finials of the c and e, the top of the f, the descender of the j, the serif of the k, a heavier ear on the r, a more open t, a broader v and w, a different x, and, again, a non-calligraphic z. Originally the bold cut conformed even more to the superellipse shape than the regular one, since all the glyphs had to be fitted to the same width. We have redrawn the bold cut to provide a better match with the regular. This means its shapes have become generally broader, also noticeably darker. Medium and Semibold weights were also interpolated, with a colour similar to the original bold cut. The condensed variants’ width is 85 percent of the original. The design of the Bold Condensed weights was optimised for the setting of headlines, while the lighter ones are suited for normal condensed settings. All the OpenType fonts include small caps, numerals, fractions, ligatures, and expert glyphs, conforming to the Suitcase Standard set. Over half a century of consistent quality ensures perfect legibility even in adverse printing conditions and on poor quality paper. RePublic is an exquisite newspaper and magazine type, which is equally well suited as a contemporary book face.

Plumage is somewhat unusual in that it has elements of calligraphy as well as script in a semi-loose form that gives it a pleasing appearance for both large and small sizes, and interesting flare finish strokes add to its unique character. As I read a dictionary description of "plumage", I realized that in many ways there is a parallel between a bird's plumage and how it is utilized in the context of writing: Plumage varies in pattern and arrangement for different purposes; what it expresses can of course be even more interesting. Plumage is disposable after a season, as new ones become available... imagine, a self-sustaining quill! - I guess that's equivalent to a refill or disposable pen. Historically, quill pens were made from feathers of a variety of birds, each chosen for its special characteristics. The sturdiest and most reliable feathers, however, come from turkeys, swans and geese. Feathers used to make pens are the stiff-spined flight feathers on the leading edge of the bird's wing. Pens for right-handed writers come from the left wing, and pens for left-handers, from the right! Each bird yields 10-12 good quills, and sometimes only 2 or 3 - so small a yield that the geese reared in England could not furnish nearly enough for local demand, and quills were imported from the Continent in large quantities. At one point St Petersburg in Russia was sending 27 million quills a year to the UK. It is said that geese were specially bred by US President Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) to supply his own vast need for quills - in his lifetime he wrote almost 20,000 letters. The name "Plumage" was selected to pay homage to the noble birds that supplied countless quills for centuries of literary works. Plumage is recommended for any formal or informal invitation, decorations, awards, poetry, plaques, etc. We hope you will have the pleasure of using Plumage.