Century Oldstyle is Linn Boyd Benton’s and Morris Fuller Benton’s renovation of Phemister’s Miller & Richard Old Style for ATF forty-five years later, using the Century name for marketing purposes.

In the beginning of the 800s, during the reign of Carolus Magnus (or “Karolus”, as he signed himself), a great reformation of the written characters was conducted under the authority of Alcuin, Paul Diacre and Theodulfe. The new style, named “Caroline” script, was completely set up between 820 to 830. It was a regular script, with few ligatures, very legible, but only with lowercase. The capitals remained the old Romans ones. We have created the font to serve contemporary users, making a difference between U and V, and also between I and J, which had no relevance for ancient Latin scribes. We also added Thorn, Oslash, Lslash, W, and and the usual accented characters that did not exist at the time. Titlings (initial letters, without accents), historical and contextual alternates completes the set (in two separate files for MacOS9).