Gaius is a beautiful script face with a nice relationship between the broad-edged pen and the proportions of the letterforms. It is very flexible and gives a personal touch due to its various alternate fonts with swash beginners, ending and ligature letterforms. Like Zapfino from Hermann Zapf, Gaius offers a great variety and makes the text more personal and readable.

From alphabets created for book illustrations in the 1970s to lettering created for a book jacket in the 1990s, the Mentor family of typefaces has developed along its own slow and circuitous path. Always present in its evolution, though, has been the influence of three 20th century design giants: Eric Gill, Reynolds Stone, and Hermann Zapf, as filtered through the meticulous sensibility of Michael Harvey.

A light chancery script font influenced by both the hand-held pen and the typefounder’s machinery. The curves are reminiscent of the beak of the avocet, a wading bird. This font was originally engraved in metal and copper matrices made for casting into hot metal type for letterpress printing.