Originally designed in 1996, Mrs Eaves was Zuzana Licko’s first attempt at the design of a traditional typeface. It was styled after Baskerville, the famous transitional serif typeface designed in 1757 by John Baskerville in Birmingham, England. Mrs Eaves was named after Baskerville’s live in housekeeper, Sarah Eaves, whom he later married. One of Baskerville’s intents was to develop typefaces that pushed the contrast between thick and thin strokes, partially to show off the new printing and paper making techniques of his time. As a result his types were often criticized for being too perfect, stark, and difficult to read. Licko noticed that subsequent interpretations and revivals of Baskerville had continued along the same path of perfection, using as a model the qualities of the lead type itself, not the printed specimens. Upon studying books printed by Baskerville at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, Licko decided to base her design on the printed samples which were heavier and had more character due to the imprint of lead type into paper and the resulting ink spread. She reduced the contrast while retaining the overall openness and lightness of Baskerville by giving the lower case characters a wider proportion. She then reduced the x-height relative to the cap height to avoid increasing the set width. There is something unique about Mrs Eaves and it’s difficult to define. Its individual characters are at times awkward looking—the W being narrow, the L uncommonly wide, the flare of the strokes leading into the serifs unusually pronounced. Taken individually, at first sight some of the characters don’t seem to fit together. The spacing is generally too loose for large bodies of text, it sort of rambles along. Yet when used in the right circumstance it imparts a very particular feel that sets it clearly apart from many likeminded types. It has an undefined quality that resonates with people. This paradox (imperfect yet pleasing) is perhaps best illustrated by design critic and historian Robin Kinross who has pointed out the limitation of the “loose” spacing that Licko employed, among other things, yet simultaneously designated the Mrs Eaves type specimen with an honorable mention in the 1999 American Center for Design competition. Proof, perhaps, that type is best judged in the context of its usage. Even with all its shortcomings, Mrs Eaves has outsold all Emigre fonts by twofold. On MyFonts, one of the largest on-line type sellers, Mrs Eaves has been among the 20 best selling types for years, listed among such classics as Helvetica, Univers, Bodoni and Franklin Gothic. Due to its commercial and popular success it has come to define the Emigre type foundry. While Licko initially set out to design a traditional text face, we never specified how Mrs Eaves could be best used. Typefaces will find their own way. But if there’s one particular common usage that stands out, it must be literary—Mrs Eaves loves to adorn book covers and relishes short blurbs on the flaps and backs of dust covers. Trips to bookstores are always a treat for us as we find our Mrs Eaves staring out at us from dozens of book covers in the most elegant compositions, each time surprising us with her many talents. And Mrs Eaves feels just as comfortable in a wide variety of other locales such as CD covers (Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief being our favorite), restaurant menus, logos, and poetry books, where it gives elegant presence to short texts. One area where Mrs Eaves seems less comfortable is in the setting of long texts, particularly in environments such as the interiors of books, magazines, and newspapers. It seems to handle long texts well only if there is ample space. A good example is the book /CD/DVD release The Band: A Musical History published by Capitol Records. Here, Mrs Eaves was given appropriate set width and generous line spacing. In such cases its wide proportions provide a luxurious feel which invites reading. Economy of space was not one of the goals behind the original Mrs Eaves design. With the introduction of Mrs Eaves XL, Licko addresses this issue. Since Mrs Eaves is one of our most popular typefaces, it’s not surprising that over the years we've received many suggestions for additions to the family. The predominant top three wishes are: greater space economy; the addition of a bold italic style; and the desire to pair it with a sans design. The XL series answers these requests with a comprehensive set of new fonts including a narrow, and a companion series of Mrs Eaves Sans styles to be released soon. The main distinguishing features of Mrs Eaves XL are its larger x-height with shorter ascenders and descenders and overall tighter spacing. These additional fonts expand the Mrs Eaves family for a larger variety of uses, specifically those requiring space economy. The larger x-height also allows a smaller point size to be used while maintaining readability. Mrs Eaves XL also has a narrow counterpart to the regular, with a set width of about 92 percent which fulfills even more compact uses. At first, this may not seem particularly narrow, but the goal was to provide an alternative to the regular that would work well as a compact text face while maintaining the full characteristics of the regular, rather than an extreme narrow which would be more suitable for headline use. Four years in the making, we're excited to finally let Mrs Eaves XL find its way into the world and see where and how it will pop up next.

Johann Michael Fleischmann was born June 15th, 1707 in Wöhrd near Nuremberg. After attending Latinschool he started an apprenticeship as punchcutter in the crafts enterprise of Konstantin Hartwig in Nuremberg, which ought to last six years. For his extraordinary talent Fleischmann completed his apprenticeship after four and a half years, which was very unusual. 1727 his years of travel (very common in these days) began, during which he perfected his handcraft by working in different enterprises as journeyman. First location was Frankfurt/Main where he worked for nearly a year at the renowned type foundery of Luther and Egenolff. Passing Mainz he continued to Holland, where he arrived in November 1728 and stayed till he died in 1768. In Amsterdam he worked for several type founderies, among others some weeks for Izaak van der Putte; in The Hague for Hermanus Uytwerf. Between 1729 and 1732 he created several exquisite alphabets for Uytwerf, which were published under his own name (after his move to Holland Fleischmann abandoned the second n in his name), apparently following the stream of the time. After the two years with Uytwerf, Fleischmann returned to Amsterdam, where he established his own buiseness as punchcutter; following an advice of the bookkeeper and printer from Basel Rudolf Wetstein he opened his own type foundery 1732, which he sold in 1735 to Wetstein for financial reasons. In the following Fleischmann created several types and matrices exclusively for Wetstein. In 1743 after the type foundery was sold by Wetstein’s son Hendrik Floris to the upcoming enterprise of Izaak and Johannes Enschedé, Fleischmann worked as independent punchcutter mostly for this house in Haarlem. Recognizing his exceptional skills soon Fleischmann was consigned to cutting the difficult small-sized font types. The corresponding titling alphabets were mostly done by Jaques-Francois Rosart, who also cut the main part of the ornaments and borders used in the font examples of Enschedé. Fleischmann created for Enschedé numerous fonts. The font example published 1768 by Enschedé contains 3 titling alphabets, 16 antiquacuts, 14 italic cuts, 13 textura- and 2 scriptcuts, 2 greek typesets (upper cases and ligatures), 1 arabic, 1 malayan and 7 armenian font systems, 5 sets of musicnotes and the poliphonian musicnotesystem by Fleischmann. In total he brought into being about 100 alphabets - the fruits of fourty years of creative work as a punchcutter. Fleischmann died May 27th, 1768 at the age of 61. For a long time he was thought one of the leading punchcutters in Europe. A tragedy, that his creating fell into the turning of baroque to classicism. The following generations could not take much pleasure in his imaginative fonts, which were more connected to the sensuous baroque than to the bare rationalism of the upcoming industrialisation. Unfortunately therefore his masterpieces did not survive the 19th century and person and work of Fleischmann sank into oblivion. The impressive re-interpretation of the Fleischmann Antiqua and the corresponding italics by Erhard Kaiser from Leipzig, which were done for the Dutch Type Library from 1993 to 1997, snatched Fleischmann away from being forgotten by history. Therefore we want to place strong emphasis on this beautiful font. Fleischman Gotisch The other fonts by Fleischmann are only known to a small circle of connoisseurs and enthusiasts. So far they are not available in adequat quality for modern systems. Same applies the "Fleischman Gotisch", which has been made available cross platform to modern typeset-systems as CFF Open Type font through the presented sample. The Fleischman Gotisch has been proved to be one of the fonts, on which Fleischmann spent a good deal of his best effort; this font simply was near to his heart. Between 1744 and 1762 he created 13 different sizes of this font. All follow the same principles of forms, but their richness of details has been adapted to the particular sizes. In later times the font was modified more or less sensitive by various type founderies; letters were added, changed to current taste or replaced by others; so that nowadays a unique and binding mastercopy of this font is missing. Likewise the name of the font underwent several changes. Fleischmann himself probably never named his font, as he did with none of his fonts. By Enschedé this textura was named Nederduits, later on Nederduitsch. When the font was offered by the german type foundery Flinsch in Frankfurt/Main, the more convenient name of Fleischmann-Gotisch was chosen. In his "Masterbook of the font" and his "Abstract about the Et-character" Jan Tschichold refered to it as "Duyts" again. To honour the genious of Johann Michael Fleischmann we decided to name the writing "Fleischmann Gotisch PT" (unhyphenated). Developing the digital Fleischman Gotisch I decided not to use one of the thirteen sizes as binding mastercopy, but corresponding to the typical ductus of the font to re-create an independent use of forms strongly based on Fleischmann´s language of forms. All ascenders and descenders were standardised. Some characters, identified as added later on, were eliminated (especially the round lower case-R and several versions of longs- respectively f-ligatures) and others were adjusted to the principles of Fleischmann. Where indicated the diverse characters were integrated as alternative. They can be selected in the corresponding menu. All for the correct german black letter necessary longs and other ligatures were generated. Through the according integration into the feature-code about 85% of all ligatures in the type can be generated automatically. Problematic combinations (Fl, Fk, Fh, ll, lh, lk, lb) were created as ligatures and are likewise constructed automatically. A historically interesting letter is the "round r", which was already designated by Fleischmann; it is used after preceding round letters. Likewise interesting is the inventive form of the &-character, which is mentioned by Tschichold in his corresponding abstract. Nevertheless despite all interpretation it was very important to me to maintain the utmost fidelity to the original. With this digital version of a phantastic texturfont of the late baroque I hope to contribute to a blossoming of interest for this genious master of his kind: Johann Michel Fleischmann. OpenType features: - Unicode (ISO 10646-2) - contains 520 glyphes - Basic Latin - Latin-1 Supplement - Latin Extended-A - Latin Extended-B - Central European Glyhps - Ornaments - Fractions - Standard ligatures - Discretionary ligatures - Historical ligatures - Kerning-Table

Aphrodite Slim Pro is not just a lighter version of its sister Aphrodite Pro. Aphrodite Slim Pro has duplicated the quantity of characters of its partner, and that means more than 500 new glyphs, reaching a total of more than 1000. More delicate and meticulous, Aphrodite Slim Pro is once more a new typography with deep calligraphic ideals: We immersed ourselves into the world of each calligraphy ductus and each calligraphy masters by studying from decoration to lettering books. This was the key for the logic of Aphrodite Slim’s behavior. The new concept of Aphrodite Slim Pro was to join diverse styles of calligraphy in one in order to achieve an autonomous expressiveness, in fact, this is what calligraphy aims to, and we agreed to bring those ideals to the world of typography: It is justifiable to be inspired in hundred-year-old calligraphies, but it is even better if the results you obtain have a plus. A personal plus. During the creation process we were wondering whether it was possible to mix certain strokes of such rigid styles as uncial, (Li·n’s favourite style), with strokes of the copperplate, (Sav’s favourite style), and also to take and mix cualities of cancelleresca cursiva, formata and moderna; finally giving our creation a roman-transition italic look. So Aphrodite Slim takes ideals and aspects from those formal styles, following its own logic though, and emphasizing the fact of being a decorative typography. Calligraphy masters of our past are who we are in debt with. They are the cause we have lovely letters now. They have been spontaneous at the moment of creation, what differs from the type-designers of nowadays, whose spontaneity is more limited. Digital faces that we are used to see these days are a result of long hours of optical adjustments, grids, macros and inspirations of other existing typography, but without personal contributions. Aphrodite Slim wants to refute this. Its mission is to rescue de spontaneity of the artesanal lettering in order to obtain unique words; those which only calligraphy masters of our past or lettering artists of our present could give us. We have worked hard to achieve this, making Aphrodite the most universal font we could: It was necessary to study the most common words, focalizing more in the ones referring to “sensitivity”, of four of the most spoken languages in the world. Aphrodite Slim has an enormous quantity of decorative characters and special ligatures for phrases and words in English, French, Spanish and German. (See English, Français, Español, Deutsch PDF in the gallery section). We promise there is no existing type that decorates/ligates glyphs and words like Aphrodite Slim does: It is the first time a font like this really considers its purpose. -The way glyphs are ligated is insane- : Aphrodite Slim rescues some ideals of persons like Jan van den Velde (Italian cancilleresca writing of XVI Century) who understands ascenders and descenders as possibilities to beautify the lines of writing with curved strokes that seem to be dancing above and below of the words. This master also creates ascenders and descenders even where they are not necessary, on letters that do not actually need them: Aphrodite Slim takes this ideal. The font counts with a wide range of glyphs that seem not to be satisfied with its more primitive form and prefer to extreme their parts to be decorative. It also existed masters of calligraphy like José de Casanova of XVII Century, who, with a magnificant skill and a really personal mark, had the particularity of ligating words that were actually separated with spaces. This is another innovative feature in Aphrodite Slim. An investigation of the most common beginnings and endings words of the English language was done. Having that feature activated (discretionary ligatures), common words will start to ligate or to be decorated even when they are separated by spaces. Impossible to forget Francesco Periccioli of XVII Century and our experience us designers to face with works of him: His letters, that today are included in the group of cancellerescas modernas, have been a direct inspiration to the oldstyle figures and historical forms variables in Aphrodite Slim. Giovanni Antonio Tagliente (XVI Century) and his particular way of making tails and diagonals longer than usual, qualities that our creation reflects too. Finally, our adventures in Biblioteca Nacional and Barrio San Telmo, Buenos Aires, were essential for us to make Aphrodite Slim more complete and interesting: Sav did an excellent work when studying how the decorative miscellanea and swirls of early XX century were. She also investigated what particularities made those roman titling characters look antique so she could rescue some ideals for the oldstyle figures and historical forms variables. This also leaded her to create the ornaments variable in Aphrodite Slim. We are really proud of presenting Aphrodite Slim Pro, a typography that was the result of days and nights of working hard, because we do love what we do; and we are glad we are living in a present that gives us the possibility to spread this kind of art, because that is the way we consider our job: Aphrodite Slim Pro is Art. Hope you can appreciate the enormous work this type has. Features. Aphrodite Slim Pro is the most complete variable. It includes more than 1000 glyphs. Thanks to the Open-Type programming, it counts with a easy way to change/alternate glyphs if the application in which the font is used supports this. The variables contained in Aphrodite Slim Pro are also offered separately. Aphrodite Slim Text: It is the variable for lines and paragraphs. Thus it is the least ornamental and the most accurate to achieve a satisfying legibility. It has the Standard Ligatures feature in order to improve the possible conflicts some glyphs could have by others. Aphrodite Slim Contextual: It is the one that makes emphasis in decorating. It has the particularity of ligating/decorating words of common use in English, French, Spanish and German. It also has the quality of ligating common beginnings and endings of the common words in English. Aphrodite Slim Stylistic: With similar features of Slim Contextual. It includes a set of decorative numbers for a display use. Aphrodite Slim Swash: This one has special beginnings and endings to decorate words. Aphrodite Slim Endings: It makes words look as a signature. Aphrodite Slim Historical: It adds an antique look to the written word. It also has the special historical ligature function. Aphrodite Slim Titling: This one is the most decorative. Its copperplate inspired ornaments give words a special color, in order to handle the quantity of decoration, it comes with the standard ligature feature, which has the most common ligatures plus others that make decorative swirls not to be conflictive. Aphrodite Slim Ornaments: A set of 52 ornaments. Aphrodite Slim Pro includes all this features plus the Stylistic Set 1; Stylistic Set 2 and the possibility of Slashed Zero. We recommend you to check out the gallery in order to see all these features in action.