ITC Merss proves that sometimes accidents work out just fine. Late one evening Eduardo Manso, an Argentinean graphic and type designer, spilled coffee on his desk. When he began to wipe up the mess, he noticed that one of the splashes looked like a roman letter 'l' - complete with serifs. This triggered his imagination. “What if a complete alphabet was created with this same irregular flow to the character designs?” ITC Merss was the result of Manso's experiments with “fluid” letter shapes. The oddly handsome design looks aged and spontaneous at the same time. Its irregular texture is striking-the result of careful modeling of character shapes. While Manso wanted to maintain the free-form character of spilled liquid, he also knew the individual letters had to work together with an underlying harmony. When not experimenting with typefaces - or spilled coffee - Manso creates award-winning graphic and publication designs. A contributor to the design magazine el Huevo (the Egg), he also writes articles on type and typography and is part of the publication's design team.

Dreamy JNL was modeled from the hand-lettered title on the sheet music cover for "If I'm Dreaming" and features an Art Deco type design with engraved lines in both regular and oblique versions. The Jerome Kern song was from the 1929 First National/Vitaphone picture "Sally" starring Marilyn Miller.

Eduardo Manso has brought new meaning to the word distressed. The contours of Rina have been randomly inverted, spiked and split to create this agitated look. Surprisingly, Rina remains legible. And just to turn the screw a little more, Manso created an outline version, Rina Linea.

The Bitstream version of Linotype Janson. Nicholas Kis (Miklos Kis) was a Hungarian punchcutter who worked in Amsterdam. His types are some of the greatest in the Dutch old face style and have been used as models for a number of developments in this century. The Linotype version of this style, Janson, was created by Chauncey H.Griffith in 1937 and based on an original face cut by Kis in 1670–90. The face is named after Anton Janson, a Dutchman who worked in Leipzig, with whom the face has no connection. The typeface is used for text setting. Cyrillic version was developed at ParaType in 2001 by Vladimir Yefimov.

Raised in Flagstaff, Arizona, Carolyn Gibbs used her uniquely Southwestern perspective in designing the Artifact art fonts. The Artifact fonts are interpretations of rock art and symbols found in Southwestern Native American culture.

In researching historic decorative material offered by Lanston Monotype as well as other metal foundries such as Barnhart Brothers and Spindler, there were occasionally ornaments that defied description. Perhaps it was a Victorian sense of humor or someone really thought these were a good idea or perhaps popular taste has just changed so much over the last hundred years, or our forbearers were completely insane. In any case, LTC is somewhat proud to present a collection of the most bizarre, disturbing and baffling printers ornaments we could find. Along with mutant fowl-children and frolicsome amphibians, there are also Masonic and other secret fraternal symbols that may not be creepy to everyone, but just enough to be moderately disturbing.

Modern text font based on a Hansen Type Foundry font (circa 1872).

Frederic Goudy joined Lanston as art advisor in 1920. One of his first initiatives was to design a new version of Garamond based on original Garamond designs of 1540. Goudy intended his free-hand drawings to be cut exactly as he had drawn them and fought with the workmen at Lanston to keep them from “correcting” his work. This new type was called Garamont (an acceptable alternate spelling) to distinguish it from other Garamonds on the market. (The other Garamonds on the market at that time were later confirmed to be the work of Jean Jannon.) In 2001, Jim Rimmer digitized Garamont in two weights. The display weight is based on the actual metal outlines to compensate slightly for the ink gain that occurs with letterpress printing. The text weight is a touch heavier and more appropriate for general offset and digital text work. Digital Garamont is available to the public for the first time in 2005.

It's cool to be square. Among the many strange attempts to conceal writing, these two systems allegedly used by the Masons have a wonderful simplicity and relative ease of use. Both systems, the Rosicrucian and Free Mason, (also called the Pigpen cypher) as simple replacement ciphers never offered very great cryptographic security, but certainly would ensure that the casual observer would not be able to read documents written in such scripts.

This font contains every variant found in the Hebrew Bible such as the “mutilated” Waw in Numbers 25: verse 12, the small Heh in Genesis 2: verse 4 and the Nun Inversum before Numbers 10: verse 35 and after verse 36 and elsewhere as well as oversized consonants and various double-wide consonants used in inscriptions.

This font contains every variant found in the Hebrew Bible such as the “mutilated” Waw in Numbers 25: verse 12, the small Heh in Genesis 2: verse 4 and the Nun Inversum before Numbers 10: verse 35 and after verse 36 and elsewhere as well as oversized consonants and various double-wide consonants used in inscriptions.

This font contains every variant found in the Hebrew Bible such as the “mutilated” Waw in Numbers 25: verse 12, the small Heh in Genesis 2: verse 4 and the Nun Inversum before Numbers 10: verse 35 and after verse 36 and elsewhere as well as oversized consonants and various double-wide consonants used in inscriptions.

Kis Classico™ is named after the Hungarian monk Miklós Kis who traveled to Amsterdam at the end of the seventeenth century to learn the art of printing. Amsterdam was a center of printing and punchcutting, and Kis cut his own type there in about 1685. For centuries, Kis's type was wrongly attributed to Anton Janson, a Dutch punchcutter who worked in Leipzig in the seventeenth century. Most versions of this type still go by the name Janson. In 1993, the Italian/Swedish type designer Franko Luin completed Kis Classico, his own contemporary interpretation of the Kis types. About the Kis/Janson story, Luin says: If you understand Hungarian I recommend you read the monograph, 'Tótfalusi Kis Miklós' by György Haiman, published in 1972 by Magyar Helikon. It has hundreds of reproductions from his Amsterdam period and from the time when he was an established printer in Kolozsvár (today's Cluj in Romania)." Kis Classico has five weights, and is an admirable version of this classic type.

A poster for the 1932 film “Shanghai Express” starring Marlene Dietrich has the films name is a semi-Asian lettering style. This bold poster font is now available as Asian Railway JNL in both regular and oblique versions.